


one thing I could save from the fire

by strikinglight



Category: Yuri!!! on Ice (Anime)
Genre: Aged-Up Character(s), Alternate Universe - Pacific Rim Fusion, Drift Compatibility, Gen, Grief/Mourning, M/M, Partnership, Team as Family
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-03-19
Updated: 2017-05-19
Packaged: 2018-10-07 18:57:24
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 6
Words: 42,550
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10367229
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/strikinglight/pseuds/strikinglight
Summary: Sender:Celestino Cialdini, Headmaster, PPDC Jaeger AcademySubject:Official Recommendation - Cadet Yuri Plisetsky, Ranger-in-TrainingRecommendation Status:Recommended with ReservationNotes:A talented cadet with commendable physical ability and a well-rounded skill-set, but impeded by lower-than-average synchronization rates and a generally unstable Drift connection. Potentially high-functioning pilot if a compatible partner can be found. Failing that, highly suitable for a number of officer positions in the J-Tech division.In which two problem kids learn to ride together, and soon find that the battles are inside your head long before they're out on the water.





	1. like birds of prey

**Author's Note:**

  * For [nylie](https://archiveofourown.org/users/nylie/gifts).



> I'm not sure how this happened. All I can tell you is that Pacific Rim is one of the best things to have happened to me ever. YOI and Otayuri are not too far behind, which is why we're here. Long story short I had a problematic-rookies-learn-to-pilot-and-in-the-process-trust-each-other-and-themselves-and-their-teammates-and-all-that-good-stuff training arc idea that spun out way longer than it should have, so uh. Here we are. I'd love it if you gave this monster project a shot with me.
> 
> Dedicated to Ny, who's practically copiloting this beast, and who reads through all my rough drafts and yells with me about the scenes I have yet to write, which honestly may keep me alive long enough to actually write them. You're the best ever.
> 
> Fic title from Richard Siken's "Saying Your Names." Chapter 1 title from "Birds of Prey" by Anberlin.
> 
> There's a playlist I loop while I'm working on this that sends me straight into science-fiction-with-many-feelings-attached-land. For the full experience you can listen [here](https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLuz3Ns1Ub9SrjIzI7RwDQOaX_yTwOsHwV).

The kaiju sighted at 1700 hours on the first of May 2021 breaks the surface of the Sea of Japan off the coast of Dalnegorsk, making for the shore. The image that the sensors call up on Otabek’s monitor is broad and bipedal, with a wicked curved horn crowning the top of its head and two axelike spikes of bone protruding from its back. Armored all over except at the joints and the base of the throat, where the bony plates taper off into unprotected flesh. He knows the pilots will be studying the same image on the HUD in their Jaeger, homing in on those vulnerable points, calculating how best to reach them.

“All good upstairs, Mission Control?” Right-hemisphere pilot for the Mark-4 Jaeger Justice Jackal Isabella Yang speaks through the communication line, into his ear. “Are we cleared to engage?”

Otabek spares a glance at one of the screens to his left, taking stock of the stability of the neural bridge before answering. “Affirmative, Justice Jackal. You’ve got a stable Drift going.”

After he’s rechecked the pilots’ vitals and brain activity once more for good measure and keyed in a few more commands, the metallic, toneless voice of the central operating system’s AI sounds, reverberating all through the control tower. **Simulation Start: Justice Jackal. Target: Category 4 kaiju, codename Hookheart.**

Six months now Otabek’s been assisting with neural bridge operations at the J-Tech lab, facilitating test-Drifts and sync tests and running simulated battles. Officially the sim is meant to serve as a proving ground for Rangers-in-training, to familiarize them with the Drift and teach them the particulars of handling a Jaeger, though given the closeness with which it’s able to mirror the experience of actual combat it’s not uncommon for full-fledged pilots to also make use of it on the regular, to keep their skills sharp between attacks. Otabek’s current charges have logged more hours on the simulator than anyone else on the base, even the current point team.

Some of the techs—meaning Phichit, by and large—like to chat all throughout the simulation, trading tips and tactics and gossip with the pilots in their pods, so at ease even in the midst of battle that you’d swear there were three people in the Drift instead of two. The extra handholding’s proven to spell the difference between success and failure for a good few wet-behind-the-ears trainees still struggling to think on their feet, but Otabek prefers to keep his own counsel, whatever he might see playing out on the screens, speaking barely at all beyond the necessary cues. He’d once heard a senior Ranger describe a run through the Jaeger Combat Simulator as “trying to solve a Rubix cube in the middle of a boxing match,” and he knows that, more than any kind of instruction that might come from the outside, you need to concentrate on what’s in front of you to win. The trainees, just by necessity, figure this out eventually. The more seasoned pilots know it back to front.

“Go ahead and put your feet up, Altin.” The new voice in his ear is Jean-Jacques “JJ” Leroy, Isabella’s partner and fiancé and one of the only souls on-base with even a shadow of a chance of matching Phichit for chattiness. Otabek can see on the main monitor that they’ve hit the water, striding at top speed through the shallows to intercept the kaiju at the requisite distance of ten miles off the coast of the virtual city, but JJ talks like he’s knee-deep in a kiddie pool. “Catch some Z’s or something. We won’t tell.”

“I don’t know about you, but I’d like not to be demoted for abetting illegal naps,” Isabella cuts in. She’s probably rolling her eyes, even as the kaiju rears up from the water to meet them and Justice pulls her right fist back to strike out, aiming for the head. “Left hook.”

“Bella, c’mon! I’m just trying to do a friend a favor.” Hookheart staggers backward, reeling, as the Jaeger follows up from the left. Justice Jackal’s built to be a brawler, and her pilots work best running a proactive strategy, which in a nutshell means finding a way to mount a full assault as quickly as possible, and not let up until they’ve brought the monster down. It’s an approach that smells at least seventy-five percent of JJ, but for two years Isabella’s run with it, and for two years it’s mostly worked. “You’ve seen Otabek lately. Under-eye bags down to his chin, permanent scowl. All classic signs of stress.”

“He’ll be less stressed out if you stop talking his ear off every time he has to run a sim for us. Again; get it under the jaw.”

Strictly speaking, the pilots don’t _need_ to talk when they’re synchronized with the Jaeger. All the communication that matters takes place in the shared headspace created by the Drift, sophisticated deliberations playing out in a matter of seconds without need for words. But even with two years of experience as Vladivostok’s primary flank team under their belts—two solo kills, two point-team assists—JJ and Isabella still talk more than most. Otabek’s theory is that it centers them to hear each other’s voices; he imagines it’s one reason their neural bridge is one of the most secure the base has ever seen. Privately he knows he’d sit through as many hours of cockpit-talk as they wanted, just for the chance to observe the way their brainwaves spike and slow in near-perfect synchronization, although he’d never say it aloud.

There’s a moment that looks like it might tip the balance. A punch goes wide, pulling the Jaeger forward with it, and Hookheart finds its footing just in time to meet it head on. The clawed forefeet descend on Justice’s shoulders, raking against the metal and screeching as they grapple in the surf. Otabek’s first instinct is to look back at the brain scans; sure enough, JJ’s lines have sped up, gone jagged across the screen as his thoughts race to regroup. He’s always had the more dynamic mind, but those high-intensity mental processes also mean the panic’s like to get him if he isn’t careful.

“JJ, don’t let him breach the pod.” Isabella’s voice is warning, but she takes care at all times to keep it level. This is why she holds the right hemisphere—the lead pilot’s place, for all intents and purposes. She’s a watcher. She catches JJ and holds him steady, pulls him back into sync. (It’s funny to some of the older veterans but not by any means unprecedented, to have the bride in the lead like this; the Marshal herself and her partner were the same way, back in the day, as was Vladivostok’s first and most renowned point team.)

“I hear you, babe.” He’s quick to rally—he always is, with her there. The left fist comes up again, and one retractable arm-blade slides into view just in time to sink into the swathe of unarmored tissue along the underside of the kaiju’s throat. The cut knocks Hookheart clear, giving Justice the shooting space she needs for an impact at point-blank range. “One counterattack coming right up, JJ-style.”

Justice’s frontmost armor plates slide apart, and her chest-mounted missile launcher empties a full salvo into the kaiju’s head and neck. With a final long scream it collapses in the surf and sinks below the surface, disappearing from view. The blip on Otabek’s radar likewise winks out.

“You’re in the clear, Rangers,” he says. “Looks like a new personal best.” In front of him the computer hums as it draws up the assessment report for the simulation, calculating values for total duration, damage sustained, and Kaiju blue containment, but he already knows it’s a new high score.

He can practically hear Isabella’s smile, red-lipped and triumphant and just a little wild, crackling to brilliant life over the comm. “Thanks, tech. Couldn’t have done it without you.”

It’s the AI that answers in his stead as the image of the Jaeger fades from view, standing tall, the water roiling about its legs glowing with the fluorescent blue blood of the monster. The words flash out across the screen to take its place: **Simulation complete. Humanity stands.**

 

Otabek’s last task of the evening is to go upstairs to the main lab, to encode and file the last batch of simulation reports. The rest of the techs have cleared out for the day, gone back to their quarters or down to the mess hall for dinner—no one else is around but Phichit, hunched like a gargoyle over one of the computers by the wall, so fully absorbed in his task he doesn’t even look up to say hello. Highly anomalous behavior for Phichit, so Otabek approaches.

“Are you winning the war, Dr. Chulanont?”

“Haha. Just you wait ‘til you’re the one swimming in homework from the top brass.” Phichit’s shoulders pop audibly as he straightens up and stretches his arms high above his head. His grin is half a grimace, worn down at the edges, but still wide enough across to split his face in two. It must be doing wonders for his sanity to see a friendly face, talk to a real person, even if Otabek never has much to offer by way of either friendliness or conversation. “I’ve gone through so many files I could probably tell you the names of all the candidates for official Ranger training in my sleep. _Plus_ blood types, _plus_ countries of origin.”

Maybe it’s to be expected that even Phichit’s unassailable good humor is giving way a little, buckling under the strain. Everyone’s operating on frayed nerves and too little sleep these days; what Otabek hears of the official base-to-base communications is hardly encouraging, snatches of gossip and conjecture, two Jaegers going down at different bases in the same month, a predicted rise in the frequency of Kaiju attacks. Add to that the pet theory that’s being passed around among the crazies down in K-Science, that the kaiju are evolving both physically and mentally based on the fighting experiences of the ones the Jaegers manage to take down.

To stoke the fire even higher, a minimum of three operational Jaegers is standard protocol for every Shatterdome, and as things currently stand Vladivostok is short-staffed. Senior pilots Nikiforov and Katsuki lead the defense with only Yang and Leroy on-site to assist; just last month the base lost Sara and Michele Crispino to an emergency transfer to the Sydney Shatterdome, itself a stopgap measure to cover for yet another lost team. It’s not at all a stretch to imagine how easily a strike group of only two might be picked off by a Category 4 kaiju, however seasoned its Rangers. No wonder the brass are scrambling.

News through the grapevine—not that Otabek ever actively listens for it, but somehow it always finds him—is that there’s a new crop from the Academy coming within the week. It only makes sense for Phichit to have been put in charge of canvassing for a new team among the recruits. He’s been the favorite psych analyst since he did some gamechanging therapy work with Katsuki Yuuri a few years ago; Otabek’s never quite gotten the full story of his rise in the ranks out of him (“It’s embarrassing! That was a long time ago!”) but it’s enough to see that he knows everything about everyone, above and beyond whatever vital information you might find in their individual files.

He can’t help a little smile of his own, in sympathy. “Plus favorite foods and colors?”

“And whether they prefer boxers or briefs, yeah. God.” Phichit kicks out the empty chair next to him and motions Otabek into it, waving the folder in his hand back and forth like a banner of war. “Come here, Beka. Look at this piece of work.” As Otabek accepts the file and flips it open, he takes it upon himself to narrate its contents. “Yuri Plisetsky. Aced all his physicals at the Jaeger Academy. Top marks in engineering and weapons development. An unprecedented fifty-one drops, fifty-one kills in the simulator. Interfaces with the machine like it’s in his blood.”

Otabek’s eyes have only just made it down the first page. _Fifty-one drops, fifty-one kills._ A clean zero-loss record would already have been something to write home about, for a cadet; to graduate with such a high base score on top of that seems almost criminal. But Otabek finds he could well believe it, with that name. “Isn’t it? He’s a Plisetsky.”

“That kid practically grew up on this base, did you know? He was maybe sixteen or seventeen when I came here for Yuuri. Always wanted to be a pilot. Seeing his name on this file felt like a dream.” The exhaustion slips for a moment from Phichit’s face, laying bare the excitement beneath until he’s practically beaming. His eyes leave Otabek, going misty as they stare out into the distance, almost wistful. “You know about Astra Nova, then, I guess.”

“Everybody knows about Astra Nova.” There had been no shortage of stories about them at the Academy, in the mess hall, in the barracks. Nadia and Sasha Plisetsky, the first Rangers to lead the charge out of Vladivostok in the earliest days of the Jaeger program, decorated heroes of the Kaiju War. Of course their son would be a golden boy—but Otabek doesn’t have to do much more than turn to the second page of his file to see the caveat. “This range of Drift compatibility, though.”

“ _Abysmal_ , right?” Phichit’s already-disheveled bangs flop into his eyes as he shakes his head, pitching his voice high and shrill. “Oh yeah, sure, Vladivostok, here’s your boy back! The best we have! Cream of the crop! Just one thing though, one minor detail we thought you should know about: _he can barely Drift.”_ When he laughs, even if it’s an exhaustion-laugh, a stress-laugh—not a genuine, true, bubbling Phichit-laugh—it shakes his whole body. Otabek almost puts out a hand to keep him from falling out of his chair. “He can’t keep a stable connection, just knocks out everyone who tries to get in.”

“...This wasn’t something you anticipated?”

“He’s always been, uh. Difficult, I guess, is the word. We’d kind of hoped the Academy would teach him to control his claws, but now they’re handing him back to the Marshal, and she’s handing him off to me, and maybe if it also snows in hell somewhere along the way I’ll be able to find someone he doesn’t absolutely hate having inside his head.” Phichit sighs, smiling sheepishly down at his hands. “Can you _believe_ it?”

He can believe it, is the thing. Otabek remembers perusing his own file, reading the assessments of his own poor synchronization rates. The other recruits in his rotation had found the experience of Drifting with him—unsettling, he thinks, was the word the analysts had used, the inside of his head too cold, the silence too absolute. It was impossible, after all, to build the neural bridge without trust, and how could you trust someone who carried nothing into the Drift?

That file sits now in the back of a drawer in Phichit’s filing cabinet. It’s why Otabek had known, almost word for word, how Yuri Plisetsky’s official recommendation would read: _Recommended with reservation. A talented cadet with commendable physical ability and a well-rounded skill-set, but impeded by lower-than-average synchronization rates and a generally unstable Drift connection. Potentially high-functioning pilot if a compatible partner can be found. Failing that, highly suitable for a number of officer positions in the J-Tech division._

Six months he’s been sitting on that phrase: “if a compatible partner can be found.” He remembers that file in Phichit’s hands at the welcoming assembly for the new recruits in the big entrance hall, how he had walked straight up to Otabek as the group began to scatter and greeted him like he was welcoming an old friend home: _The Marshal showed me your Psych grades. How’d you feel about helping me out in the labs while you wait for a decent placement? I’d love to have you around—but it’s your choice, of course._

Otabek had chosen, and somehow taught himself not to think overmuch about six months of waiting. The psych labs in the J-Tech wing had been, at the very least, somewhere to make himself useful. A place to belong, after a fashion.

“I wouldn’t worry. He’s not the first problem kid you’ve had to place.”

“No, but the other problem kid proved surprisingly helpful.” Phichit winks at him, and extends his hand for Yuri Plisetsky’s file. “God, Beka. I want this guy to ride so bad, but I already know—he’s going to be a headache and a half.”

 

* * *

 

  
On the flight to Vladivostok, Yuri Plisetsky presses his forehead to the helicopter window and imagines the world ending in water.

There’s nothing to it. The last leg of this journey is all ocean, hours and hours of it unfurling like a flag eight thousand feet below—an expanse the color of ink shot through with frothy white trails where the waves have whipped themselves to anger, so vast it looks like it covers the whole world. If you’re fanciful you might conjecture that one day the water will take whatever the monsters alive in the depths don’t manage to destroy, the tide rolling in there at the end of all things and never receding, reaching out with spidery, grasping hands to gather the debris.

“How much longer to the Shatterdome, Plisetsky?” the boy in the seat on Yuri’s left asks, mouth to his ear, braying over the noise of the rotor blades above them. Yuri flinches back from the window and whips his head around but can’t match a name to the face—bright, beady eyes like a pair of glass marbles, lips curled in a sneer. Some Mikhail, probably. Some Ilya or Ivan or Egor. It doesn’t matter.

“Hell if I know. I’m not flying this thing.”

“And here I was thinking you’d know the way home. Weren’t you born in the cockpit of a Jaeger?”

 _Conn-Pod,_ Yuri almost says, the venom acrid on his tongue. _It’s called a Conn-Pod, for fuck’s sake._ And he knows he was eleven the year Reckless Light, the first Jaeger ever commissioned, rolled out of the base at Anchorage and took down the kaiju Trespasser off the coast of Alaska, but his temples have started to throb, and there’s nothing he can imagine gaining from a continued conversation with the idiot next to him that would be worth the headache, so he pinches his lips shut and leans forward, elbows braced against his knees.

Everyone and their mother’s mother had gotten on his case about it endlessly at the Academy, this habit he has of armoring up, spines out and ready to impale. _Talk to your rotation, Plisetsky. You’re on the same side, Plisetsky. It’s not your partner you ought to be fighting, Plisetsky, it’s the goddamn kaiju._

Of course he’d known. He’d known it all on paper from the first day of Drift training. But the real thing, having someone in your head was different—is different. No one he’d tested with thought fast enough, pushed hard enough toward that point of total synchronization. Worst of all were the nosy ones, who lingered too long over their own memories and probed too much at his. Those were the ones Yuri had no second thoughts about knocking out of his head in a heartbeat, tearing away from the half-formed connection so abruptly the other person came away with a migraine. Even a nosebleed once or twice, a telltale sign of neurotrauma, however minor.

 _(You can’t fight if you don’t trust your copilot,_ Celestino Cialdini had told him once after a particularly disastrous test-Drift, as they watched the medics cart the other guy away in a wheelchair, a wadded-up towel pressed over his mouth and nose, sticky red-brown splotches already soaking through.

 _I can’t trust them not to touch me,_ Yuri had bitten out, in the haze of pain slicing through to the back of his head, the acid burn in his chest he refused to recognize as fear, so potent he might go blind with it. _How the hell am I supposed to trust them with anything else?_ It had taken another five seconds and as many deep breaths before he’d managed to collect himself enough to add, perfunctorily, _Sir._

The guy had gotten better eventually, Celestino had taken care to tell him around a month later, though he’d refused to try a Drift again and eventually dropped out of the program altogether. It wasn’t a great loss, all things considered. Yuri had forgotten his name the day of the accident, as soon as he’d been wheeled out of sight.)

Now there's nothing left to talk about. They are the best the Academy has to offer, or so they’ve been told. Of the sixty or so recruits this flock of birds is carrying to Vladivostok, a good ninety percent will likely be farmed out among the different operations divisions according to the dictates of both skill and need, finding a place somewhere in the tangle of branches and sub-branches Yuri’s taught himself to rattle off in his head without thought—Jaeger engineering, weapons development, psych analysis, kaiju science, neural bridge operations, battle programming and tactics. Only a handful will ascend to on-site Ranger training. Whether Yuri Plisetsky will number among them remains to be seen; at this point he’s heard so much about his “unusual” academic record (the mildest way of putting it by far) that he almost wants to imagine himself past the point of caring. No other cadet in the history of the institution has excelled so thoroughly in all areas but one—arguably the most important one, the make-or-break. There’s no reason for him to fail this hard at this one thing. Yuri Plisetsky should carry the Drift in his blood. He knows, he knows, he knows.

When he turns back to the window, he sees the Shatterdome taking shape, the four towering gates in the seawall that let the Jaegers out into the water, the high domed roof that opens up for the choppers. The gnawing in the pit of his stomach is flight-nausea, the dryness in the hollow of his throat no more than dehydration from being so long at altitude. He doesn’t know how to think of it as coming home.

The new recruits form up on the helipad and file into the entrance hall where they stand at attention, ranged row on row before the base’s highest-ranking officials. The Marshal herself and her second are absent—probably locked up in Central Command, too busy with affairs of state to deal with such trivial matters as making inspiring speeches—but their lead Rangers are here in their stead. Victor Nikiforov and Yuuri Katsuki, pilots of the Mark-4 Harmony Tango, face them shoulder-to-shoulder—arrayed in full military regalia for the occasion, no less.

Yuri falls in with the rear line, and only just barely suppresses a snort. Those medals on their chests look brighter than his future. They must weigh as heavily, too.

“Welcome, cadets!” Victor greets them with what Yuri thinks is entirely too much cheer, given the context. Many things can be overwhelming about meeting the man in the flesh—the height, the stride, the sheer assaulting presence—but more than anything else it’s this uncanny levity of his that disarms. It’s hard to believe anybody can smile like that after ten kaiju kills. “Before anything else, please accept our congratulations on surviving the Academy. We know as well as you do how relentlessly your instructors have worked to break your spirits over the six-month training period, and you can be sure that the kaiju we’ll face down together in the near future will come at us with a similar disregard for mercy.”

There’s no warning, no change in tone that Yuri can hear, but he feels it and knows the others feel it too—that subtle shift in the air like the flick of a switchblade at the mention of kaiju, a razor-edged gleam in Victor’s eye that strips all the hush of its silence.

“You come to us at an especially precarious time in the life of our base,” Victor continues. He must know how he’s stirred the air to life now, must feel it crackling and electric around him. “K-Science tells us that the kaiju are evolving, and the only way to ensure our survival—and that of the rest of humanity too, by the way, don’t forget—is to evolve with them. Every single one of you has a key role to play in that evolution. No one is dispensable. Likewise, no one is exempt.”

“We mean to say that the base needs all hands, so you can rest assured that in the coming days the heads of each division will be doing their utmost to assign each one of you to a post befitting your abilities. Know that any and all contributions you can make to the operations of this base will be instrumental in turning the tide of this war.” Yuuri Katsuki’s been a senior Ranger for four years now; he’s practiced all the lines enough to speak them without stammering, but some things don’t change. Yuri knows him, so he knows all the places to look for nerves—the high lift of the chin, the hands restless by his sides, clenching and unclenching. “You too, now, are the body and blood of the Shatterdome. On behalf of Marshal Lilia Baranovskaya, Chief Command Center Officer Yakov Feltsman, and all on-site personnel: we welcome you to Vladivostok.”

What Victor Nikiforov agitates, Yuuri Katsuki settles, and like this they keep the base alive. Yuri doesn’t need to look around him to see the barefaced awe with which the whole room watches them. He looks down at his shoes instead, scowling, hands fisted into small balls of iron in his pockets as the applause builds to its height and drowns out every other sound.

The assembly disperses after the recruits are dismissed with an official salute. As the lines dissolve around him Yuri glimpses out of the corner of one eye how Victor bends to whisper something in Yuuri’s ear, how the latter murmurs an answer behind his hand and turns to look out at the crowd, searching. Before they can pick him out of the sea of retreating backs he’s already ducked his head low and departed.

 

They find him at mess that evening. Or, rather, they make him come to them, when Yuri has a full tray in front of him—his grandfather’s shepherd’s pie, a double serving of peas and carrots and an extra roll—and not a single person he’d willingly ask to share a table with in a dining hall full to the rafters. His grandfather will probably have his hands full supervising the dinner service, but he figures he could take his tray into the kitchen anyway and eat at an unused counter, the way he always used to do. Better that than one of the bathrooms, and better _that_ than the indignity of having to ask some stranger for a seat.

He’s just about to turn and march inside, in defiance of the sign on the kitchen door that reads _No unauthorized personnel beyond this point,_ when the voice rings out clear and sparkling, so _loud_ it rises easily above all the noise.

“Yurio! Hey, Yurio!”

It’s impossible not to know that voice. Before he can take another step he catches sight of Victor waving at him from a table on the far side of the room, by the wall, one arm scything through the air—beside him Yuuri does the same, though his raised hand is much more modest—and Yuri has no choice, then, but to approach and take the empty bench across from them. He feels the eyes of the entire base on him as he sits, hot on the back of his neck, singeing holes into his jacket at the shoulderblades, but Victor doesn’t seem the least bit aware of the small commotion he’s caused. It’s also possible he doesn’t care.

“You left the assembly in such a hurry we didn’t even get to welcome you home. Want my pudding cup?”

Yuri’s eyes roll back so far in his head he swears he can see the inside of his skull. “Pudding’s for kids.”

“It was your favorite thing ever until six months ago. Did Jaeger School break your sweet tooth along with your spirit?” Victor shrugs and starts to peel back the plastic seal. His lower lip protrudes in what Yuri realizes, with mounting incredulity, is a pout. “Well, your loss. It’s chocolate today, see.”

Victor Nikiforov had been the talk of the town at the Academy, of course. He and Yuuri Katsuki were the youngest team so far to run point at the Russian base, with a shining record of ten kaiju kills under their belts for the trainees to gush about. Eight solo kills, only two assists. A fighting style so graceful and precise the bond behind it must be deep as the dark sea itself.

 _Victor Nikiforov is not great. He doesn’t know how to ride by the book. He’s so in love with surprises that no one knows what’s going on in his head but his partner. That’s why the Marshal has him running mostly solo missions; he’s too unpredictable to mount a dependable assist, even with Katsuki to rein him in._ Each time Yuri had bitten his tongue. It didn’t matter that telling the truth would have made them hate him—he knew more than a few of them were bent on doing that regardless of anything he said or did—but telling the truth would also have prompted questions, and he’d decided long ago that he hated answering questions more than anything, even listening to the starry-eyed hero-worship of one Victor Nikiforov.

“This isn’t the best place to talk shop, but since we’re all here, the Academy sent us all your records. They’re...” Viewed up close like this, at ground level, Yuuri Katsuki flattens out and all the authority disappears. The man that faces Yuri across the table tiptoes around his words. His eyes shift, restless behind his glasses, left to right and back again. “Impressive, to say the least. Even the Marshal thinks so. Even with your difficulties.”

“My _difficulties_ ,” Yuri echoes. It’s childish of him, but Yuuri’s probing has always made him chafe. He has no business being so gentle. “Does the Marshal want me to haul my ass down to the labs and give myself up to J-Tech? Make myself useful now that I’m back here, like everyone else?”

“Someone with your skill-set would be well-suited for almost any position, Yurio.”

It’s the diplomatic answer, Yuri thinks. The safe answer. He’s already heard it repeated, in slightly different iterations, more times than he can count.

“Except the one he wants.” Victor has a plastic spoon between his teeth and a spot of the contentious pudding on his chin, but without anyone noticing he’s banished the warmth in them until his gaze is pure steel. “No way little Yurio’s going to let anyone into his head, no way you can ride without a partner.” When Yuri levels his gaze at him and doesn’t answer, he cocks his head a little and continues, throwing the words over his shoulder: “It’s lucky for you that Yuuri and I enjoy trying to solve seemingly unsolvable puzzles in our free time.”

“I’m not a puzzle.” The acid in Yuri’s tone prompts more than a few glances from the cadets the next table over, who for the past five or so minutes have made no secret of their interest in the discussion taking place between their upstart classmate and the base’s most senior pilots. Their dismayed whispers roll off, though—mere white noise, melting away easily into the ambient hum of other, less dramatic conversations.

“And you’re not unsolvable, either,” Yuuri replies before Victor can say another word. The look he shoots his partner across the table says the rest, firm and fond and reproachful, all at once. “You may not have matched with anyone at the Academy, but Lilia’s hoping we’ll find someone we can work you into sync with here on your home turf. She’s not going to give you up, and neither will we.”

Yuri scratches at the back of his neck, looks away, starts a sentence in a voice suddenly hoarse (“I’m—”), and then cuts himself off. He knows whose investment his tenure at the Academy was.

“In our debt forever, we know.” Victor all but sings the words. The plastic spoon spins between his fingers; for a moment it looks as if he’s going to make it disappear, but the real sleight of hand happens when Yuri looks up and finds, again, the twinkle returned to his eye. “Yuuri’s got Phichit Chulanont putting together a candidate list for you. If he can’t find someone, no one can.”

 _Phichit Chulanont._ Yuri repeats the name silently to himself, listens to the unusual sound of it in his inner ear. Five years ago Phichit Chulanont hadn’t asked him questions he didn’t know how to answer. He’d babbled too much and smiled way more than anyone had the right to in the middle of a war that might end the world, but Yuri remembers how Phichit had sat beside him on the couch in the consulting room, rather than across the desk as the doctors had. How he’d always had food with him for Yuri to share—apple slices or bottles of tea or packs of biscuits—and how between bites and sips and long silences he’d somehow made Yuri talk to him, open up about things the younger boy hadn’t even believed there were words for. Yuri knows he hasn’t talked with anyone like that since; hasn’t wanted to, now that he knows a little about the terror of sharing as well as its hope. He had been fifteen then. He’s twenty now, and doesn’t need to be talked through his days anymore.

Likely Phichit Chulanont still has too-bright eyes and walks with that strange bounce in his step, and knows everything about everyone. Maybe he knows enough to prove to Yuri he’s not a hopeless case, now as before.

“What do you want me to do?”

“Eat well, and get some rest,” Yuuri tells him. He looks, just then, exactly the same way he did earlier—standing at Victor’s right hand in the late afternoon light, back straight and gazing steadily ahead, an aura of unmistakable command settled capelike around his shoulders. “Meet us in the Kwoon tomorrow morning at oh-nine-hundred. Sound good, cadet?”

Something inside Yuri snaps to attention then, so instinctive he can’t even think about stopping it: “Yes, sir.” As soon as he says it he wants to put a fist through the smiles they give him.

Victor and Yuuri make it a point to lead by example; they take their trays with them as they go, to leave the table clear. Yuri watches them go out of the corner of one eye, so fixated on their departure he forgets even to deny it to himself. It’s only afterward, once they’ve disappeared out the door—Victor’s arm flung across Yuuri’s shoulders and one of Yuuri’s circling his waist, so careless, so criminally easy—that Yuri looks down at the tabletop and notices the pudding cup Yuuri left him, untouched, a clean spoon resting on a napkin next to it.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> (((whoa that sure was 6000 words of setup and yuri and otabek haven't even met yet)))
> 
> I've borrowed the Rubix-cube-boxing-match line from the Pacrim graphic novel _Tales from Year Zero_. Yuri's simulator score belongs to Mako Mori, the OG (which I ended up borrowing because I didn't exactly have a gauge for "unprecedentedly big score" besides that one figure, so).
> 
> You can be assured that JJ insists that Mission Control refer to his Jaeger as JJ. Needless to say, they don't comply.


	2. eyes of a tragedy

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Chapter title from "3 Libras" by A Perfect Circle.
> 
> Please forgive me for throwing my chapter summaries to the wind. This is, needless to say, the chapter where things start Actually Happening.
> 
> Big thank you to all the lovely people who have been good enough to comment/kudos/bookmark thus far, even if we're barely into the first act! Your light keeps me going.

Watching Yuri Plisetsky fight, it’s easy to forget the real monsters come out of the sea. He always strikes first—and then strikes again, and again, fast and fierce and relentless as a flash fire, driving his opponents to the brink.

On the floor in the Kwoon Room, four hits marks a win, and Yuri is always two steps ahead. There’s a strange and terrible precision to the way he moves, for all the temptation to read it as a mere reckless offensive; Otabek can see the intent coiled in every twist and arch of his body, how he paces his strength exactly like riding the crest of a wave, pushing the momentum further and further. Even the most stubborn of defenders gives, sooner or later. Then, the strike, the staff alive in his hand as it connects with some weak point laid bare, turns an ankle or buckles a knee or bites into unprotected ribs.

Otabek follows his moves with pen and paper, scratching out the broad strokes of each bout on the margins of the candidate list: _Strike to stomach. Strike to head and sweep. Overhead block. Upward thrust._ He’s only dimly aware of Phichit beside him, himself almost like he’s spoiling to have a go, changing his weight restlessly from foot to foot.

“Look at that form. They can’t keep up with him at all.” On Phichit’s other side, Victor bends his head to murmur in his partner’s ear. Clearly impressed, then—Otabek can hear it even from a distance.

“Because he’s not letting them.” Yuuri Katsuki, meanwhile, is not so admiring. Instead he’s frowning so hard his glasses have slipped all the way down the bridge of his nose. Possibly re-choreographing each bout in his head— _again, a_ _gain_. “The point isn’t to win; it’s a conversation, not a fight.”

Victor shrugs, leaning around to push the glasses up with a fingertip, sighing his resignation when they slide right back down. “Some people just naturally dominate conversations, you know.”

“He could have let that last guy have another two moves.”

“You never gave me any extra moves if you could help it.”

“I at least understood the point of the exercise,” Yuuri retorts, peevish. “Besides, you beat me more times than I ever beat you.”

“Yuuri, Yuuri. The point isn’t to win. It’s a conversation, not a fight.” Victor has the decency, at least, to hide his smirk behind his hand. He doesn’t even flinch when his partner slaps at his upper arm, hard enough to make a noise. “You said it yourself!

“Listen to these two,” Phichit says—and then winks at Otabek, because he knows he has been. “Victor cried the first time Yuuri ever beat him in the Kwoon, you know.”

“With happiness!”

“You say that _now_.” Phichit looks back out at the floor, where Yuri Plisetsky has just dodged an overhead strike. His face tenses up out of its usual smile, goes bland and inscrutable. “This one’s not going to make it either.”

He’s not; they already know. The pattern is too perfect to yield any irregularities. Otabek studies his own spidery handwriting, tracking the results of each bout in a column down the page. Four-two, four-two, four-two, four-two, four-two. No give at all to Yuri Plisetsky’s assault; you either break his guard or are destroyed, and so far no challenger of the six lined up on the far side of the room has managed to come further than halfway. And there’s the rub—you can’t ride together if you can’t forge a bond, you can’t forge a bond if you can’t keep up.

As if on cue, Yuri sweeps the other guy’s leg, slams him to the mat and puts the staff to his throat. Four-two. That makes six rounds. Otabek glances sideways at Phichit as he writes the numbers down on the clipboard—prophetic.

“Beautiful attack patterns, Yurio!” Victor calls. The praise is double-edged, as many of his words tend to be, if you listen past the sparkle and flourish. “But you might try a little more control. Your defense has more holes in it than a dead kaiju.”

“I won every round, didn’t I, old man?” Yuri rakes the hair back from his face, sweat-soaked straw-colored tangles, and exhales hard. Warm yellow light on the nape of his neck, the taut cord of muscle there, before he lifts his head to face Phichit. “That can’t be all you have for me, can it?”

“Oh no, not at all.” Without missing a beat Phichit reaches out to take the pen and the clipboard, and with his own hand marks an X next to the last name on the list: _Otabek Altin (Ranger-in-Training, Neural Bridge Operations)._ “Here’s your lucky number seven.”

Leave it to Phichit to make a spectacle of this introduction. A tremor runs through the room, a low-in-the-throat muttering Otabek does his best to tune out as he divests himself of his boots and his jacket and sets them on the floor. All eyes are on him, but his attention spreads itself, goes everywhere at once. He doesn’t miss the unspoken question Yuuri never quite gets his tongue around—he says only “Phichit-kun?” and Phichit answers “Yuuri,” and that’s it, that’s all the conversation they have. He doesn’t miss how Victor folds his arms over his chest, taps a thoughtful finger against his lips, and says nothing at all.

He doesn’t miss the shadows on Yuri Plisetsky’s face, either.

“You chose this guy for me?”

“I didn’t,” Phichit says. “Beka chose you.”

It’s only the truth—that is to say, he’d volunteered—but neither of them are quite prepared to hear it said in those words. Otabek can tell from the way Yuri eyes him head to toe, the staff deceptively loose in one hand, just as he knows the current that runs under his own skin—all the way down to the tips of his fingers as he chooses a staff of his own from the rack, down to the soles of his feet as they step onto the mats. They’re thrown before they even begin, but Otabek has no illusions it will put them on even ground. God only knows if he can cut it in the ring with Yuri Plisetsky, but no matter; it’s always been more about the dance than the blows, anyway.

Yuri goes in for the attack as always, but Otabek doesn’t engage him—only stands there unmoving, watching the staff as Yuri brings it up short not an inch from his face, running parallel to the bridge of the nose, right between the eyes. If he’d carried that blow through all the way, he would have cracked a skull, and they both know it. For a few beats they watch each other face to face; Otabek’s close enough to see Yuri’s brow crease the slightest bit as he wets his lips and mutters, “One-zero.”

Then he’s rocking back on his heel for power, spinning the staff backward and bringing it low for a thrust to the ribs, and now Otabek is ready for him. He parries; Yuri’s blow goes wide, opening him up just enough to allow Otabek to cut in and press his own staff to his shoulder. “One-one.”

“Two-one,” Yuri corrects him, rotating his wrist up from below to tap at Otabek’s side, out of guarding range. Fast, too fast, but he doesn’t look smug the way he sometimes does when he gets a surprise point in. Instead there’s the wrinkle across his brow again, as though Otabek is a riddle, or a math problem, or a gear in a machine that doesn’t quite turn as it should. They’re matched step for step now; they come at each other and meet in the center of the floor, and neither of them quite remember to count the collisions before Otabek knocks Yuri across the upper arm.

“Two-two,” he says, before Yuri rushes him, cutting high over his head to force him back onto the defensive. Otabek intercepts the staff’s arc and backsteps, dancing out of Yuri’s reach, drawing him out—until at the last moment he drives his body forward, shoulder connecting with Yuri’s chest, pivoting on his heel as he pulls his opponent’s free arm over one shoulder and throws him down. Three-two Otabek, the first challenger lead of the day. The tip of Otabek’s staff follows Yuri as he rolls forward, pushes himself up first onto his elbows before rising on hands and knees. His hair is matted down over his forehead now, half-snarling out of its ties, tangling out around his face.

(Off the mats, in another life, Phichit is laughing. Victor’s clapping his hands, nearly giddy with the surprise of it. “He’s off his feet! Did you see that, Yuuri?”)

Without even stopping to breathe he finds his footing again and lunges. Yuri presses the attack, driving Otabek backward across the floor until he can slip under his guard, catch him under the arm and flip him, point the staff straight and true at the center of his chest. They lock eyes up and down the length of it, fixing on each other’s faces and searching deep—and it’ll be years, Otabek thinks, before Yuri releases him. His eyes are gunships. The fury in them scorches the air like a firestorm.

“Three-three,” he says, in a whisper, like he’s got precious little strength left to spend. That he’s on his feet at all after nearly seven rounds is monstrous, and Otabek knows it’s likely just the rush that’s feeding him, keeping him upright until he can claw his way back to the finish. Otabek himself is likewise tapped, but he rolls his shoulders, lashes his body upwards and outwards, and they collide again. He already knows this will be how it ends. To break the deadlock Yuri swings for the head, and when Otabek ducks he loops around and goes low, clipping him behind the knees so that the ground falls away beneath his feet and Otabek ends up, again, on his back on the ground. His field of vision all ceiling, yellow light searing down.

Four-three Yuri. Seven bouts out of seven under his belt. Like a real soldier, Otabek thinks. The call to battle unfurls in front of him like a flag, and Yuri Plisetsky, inflamed, will follow that flag until everything that would stand against him is dead.

“That’s enough,” Yuuri says from his place by the far wall, a voice without a body, invisible somewhere above and behind and all around them.  “Let him up, Yurio.”

Nothing moves. Yuri Plisetsky is frozen looking down at him and Otabek can read too well the question in those wary eyes, bright like the edge of a naked blade: _what are you?_

“Yuri.” Yuuri tries again, harder this time—Otabek hears the force in it, and the fear underneath.  “Let him up.”

The staff drops out of Otabek’s field of view, but he doesn’t expect the hand that replaces it—long and lean, pale skin and paler web of burn scars across the palm from weapons dev. He’s reached up for that hand before he remembers himself, remembers precisely _whose_ hand it is, but by then Yuri Plisetsky’s fingers have curled into talons around his forearm and pulled him off the floor, and when he’s on his feet Otabek sees those eyes again. Yuri’s eyes fix on his face and some sort of desperation glistens, and still another question: _what is this?_

He feels the delay when they let go, like air drag, fingers sliding over wrists and across palms even after the grip is broken, prolonging contact. Neither of them can say what it means, so they go through the rest of the motions as briskly as they can, exactly as they’ve been taught. Take a step back, bow to each other, bow to the Master—or in this case, to Yuuri, who doesn’t look like he’s drawn a single breath since Otabek came up from the mats, mouth slack, wide-eyed behind his glasses. And Phichit beside him, smug and beaming.

In the end it’s Victor who breaks the silence. “I think we’ve seen all we need to see. Candidates, dismissed. Thank you for your time.” He waits for the last retreating back to round the corner beyond the doorway before coming back to the two of them, still standing at attention in the center of the floor. “Yuuri and I need to have a word with the Marshal, Yurio. You should have a final placement by this evening, after she’s had the chance to review our report.”

“Fine.” Yuri has no breath or bite left for snide remarks; his voice fractures on the word, rasping. “Fuck, hang on.” He coughs into his fist to clear his throat. “I can go too, then?”

Victor nods and they move, Yuri to one end of the mats and Otabek to the other, retrieving discarded clothing, hustling to get all buttoned up. Then Yuri’s out the door, out of sight, while Otabek dawdles over his bootlaces. Over his head, the senior officers banter; between the sounds he hears in his memory—staff hitting staff, body hitting floor, a needlepoint-voice calling the numbers in his ear—he listens.

“... completely unexpected. You’re coming up to Central Command with us, Phichit-kun.”

“Yuuri, my dear, whatever do you need me for?”

“To explain what happened this morning.” When Otabek straightens up they’re smiling around at each other, all three of them, but Yuuri already has one arm looped so securely through Phichit’s there’s no chance of escape, barring another tussle on the sparring floor. “I’m sure Lilia will want to hear from the mastermind himself, wouldn’t you say, Vitya?”

“Definitely.” Victor stands on Phichit’s other side, one hand easy on his shoulder. There’s a gleam in his eye when he tilts his head back and grins. “You know how much she values your expertise.”

Phichit seems to take this surprise detainment in stride; he, too, is grinning when he cranes his head over Victor’s shoulder to wink at Otabek. “Guess I’m under arrest. We’ll talk later, Beka.”

“All right.” Otabek nods, diffident; there’s a big _late_ in that _later,_ if the looks on their faces are any indication. Here at the end, he is hyper-aware—of the insides of his palms stinging, of the red bite of the mat burn across his upper back where the jacket chafes against it. “I’ll close the Kwoon.”

 

* * *

 

Yuri’s idling in the kitchen when the letter arrives late the following afternoon, straight from the Marshal’s desk, to certify that he’s been officially cleared for advanced Ranger training, and in light of this is enjoined to relocate to his assigned room in the pilots’ quarters before the end of the day. It’s a clear-cut set of marching orders, unencumbered by any bureaucratic flattery, and Yuri sets to following them with an urgency befitting a trained soldier—helped along by no small measure of prodding from his grandfather Nikolai, who needs him out of the way while he and his cabal of junior cooks set to putting together the dinner service anyway.

It’s not as if he has much to take with him when he does go, just his clothes and a few other essentials, enough to refill the duffel bag he took with him to the Academy. Everything else—anything he doesn’t strictly need, anything that might slow him down—he leaves. The books on the desk, the folded blanket. The framed photographs that line the top of the chest of drawers by the little porthole window, of himself at six, eleven, fourteen; first smiling between his parents in the airbase outside Moscow, and then later here, at the entrance to the Shatterdome on the day of the inauguration, and then in the hangar, looking up at Astra Nova, who towers so tall above him she doesn’t even fit in the frame. Yuri always tells himself he’s never been one for sentimentality, but deep down he knows it’s the more sentimental thing to let them stay where they are, untouched as his grandfather had so carefully arranged them the day they moved into this room. They’ve both remarked more than once that looking at them one by one is like watching him age, all over again.

The packing process is almost exactly the same as half a year ago—roll and stuff, spend a few minutes doing battle with the zipper. For good measure he mops the floor and wipes down all flat surfaces before he leaves; dinner is always especially busy, and Nikolai is allergic to dust. And maybe a clean room will be half-decent compensation for a missing grandson, even if he’s not going much further than a couple of floors up.

Dinner is over by the time Yuri finishes his chores, so he heads straight back to the kitchens, ignoring as always the sign that’s meant to restrict his entry. There’s a sandwich on the center table with his name on it that he swipes without looking twice before making his way to the other end of the room, where his grandfather stands locked in battle with a dish pile a foot high, elbow-deep in soap suds. But he’s not too busy to look up and spare a smile as Yuri draws up beside him, back against the counter, his mouth full.

“Look at you.” This is almost a catchphrase of Nikolai’s, one that’s seen more and more frequent use these past years. It’s his default response to change, major or minor, anything from a new uniform to a major promotion. “I’ll be truthful, Yurochka, I wish you didn’t have to go.”

It warms Yuri to hear it even as it makes his heart sink. “I’m not going far, Deda. Two or three floors at most. I’ll still come here and get in your hair every day.”

“You know what I mean.” Nikolai puts out one forgetful, sudsy hand to ruffle Yuri’s hair. He bends his head obligingly, watching the soap flake down around his face like new snow, settle on his shoulders. It’ll leave sticky spots later, for sure, but that’s not important. “You’ve been fighting me about active duty since you were twelve. Maybe I’m just in denial that you’re about to get your wings for real.”

 _That’s if we make it that far._ He doesn’t know how to say it’s not so much a guarantee as another link in a chain—the Kwoon is one thing, but the slew of tests and simulations he has yet to face are another, to say nothing of the Drift itself. At this point there’s no way of telling what’s ahead, seeing as he’s never made it this far with anyone else before, and he has no choice but to take a chance on a guy about whom he knows exactly two things—that his name is Otabek Altin, and that his shoulder throw is ruthless enough to scorch the skin from whatever surface of his opponent’s body is unfortunate enough to make first contact with the mats that line the Kwoon Room floor.

(Yuri’s arm is still raw and abraded from elbow to shoulder a day later. He’s been taking care to disinfect and tape it up himself, rather than trust it to the busybodies in the medical wing, who have always asked too many questions.)

“You mean you were actually holding out for me to change my mind?”

“No. No, I guess not, but old men can still have dreams. And sometimes even I forget who gave you that hard head of yours.” There’s a softness now, a rue, to Nikolai’s smile. His eyes, too, shine with it, even as he turns away from Yuri to concentrate on rinsing his hands. “You look very much the soldier now.”

Which means a damn sight more cocksure than he feels, Yuri thinks, as he contemplates his reflection in the polished steel countertop. They’ve made jokes about this that have run for years—that they’re the father and child of war itself, and so they’ve been saying goodbye to one another since the day Yuri was born. While no two departures are quite the same, it’s tempting to think they’d get used to it eventually. Learn to take it for what it is, like everything else about this world they live in, which seems bent on teaching them how much they can endure.

“I’ll be safe in the machine, I promise.”

Even that isn’t a guarantee, but it’s all they have.

 

Yuri arrives at the new room—number three on the third floor, at the very end of the west wing where all Rangers are billeted—to find Otabek already there, cross-legged on the floor by the closet, folding his clothes. He looks up when the door swings to and meets Yuri’s eyes square on, but he doesn’t say hello. Instead he leads with a question, as though they’re picking up some prior conversation that hadn’t quite ended when they last crossed paths.

“Did you eat?”

It’s so out-of-left-field Yuri nearly forgets he skipped dinner. Be that as it may, the base is crawling with people, and the mess hall is always packed to the rafters at mealtime; he’d assumed his absence would have gone unnoticed, with no one there to miss him.

“Yeah, I did.” He takes his time closing the door, forcing his hands to slow down on the doorknob and on the strap of his bag as he lowers it from his shoulder to the floor, to keep them from coming up to rub at the back of his neck, where the skin’s begun to prickle and warm without warning. His manners get ahead of his mouth—a rare enough occurrence to be alarming in itself, and he can’t catch up quite fast enough to stop himself before he asks, “You?”

“Mm-hmm.” Otabek’s gaze, at least, isn’t following him; it’s back on the half-open backpack at his side as he fishes the last of his shirts out of it, laying them out on the floor in front of him so he can begin to fold them in perfect squares. He moves into his next question before Yuri can even blink. “Up or down?”

“Huh?” There’s a bit of a delay in the processing of the information, but then Yuri sees him nod his head toward the bunk beds against the wall and then he understands. In the barracks at the Academy choosing beds had always been more trouble than it was worth; he can still hear the raucous laughter, the yells of _top or bottom, top or bottom,_ and the inside of his mouth sours.

This, at least, is quieter, less bullshit to wade through between the two of them. He almost asks if Otabek has a preference, but this time he _does_ catch himself—to ask would be way too much politeness for one day, for someone he doesn’t even know. It’s enough of an answer to shed his jacket, dump it in a crumpled little heap in the top bunk.

This is nothing, nothing at all like being in the Kwoon Room together. Not that he’d been expecting it to be, of course; he’s so at home in the Kwoon Room he sometimes begins to think there’s a grain of truth to that quip he’s always hearing people make behind his back, that there’s nothing he knows how to do better than fight. But this, this is being alive together. Existing in the same space. On the surface it’s stupid to think there’d be anything difficult about it, but—

Then again, some things are the same, too, off the sparring floor. Yuri watches Otabek sideways as he starts his own unpacking. He folds his clothes like he fights, staid and watchful and deliberate, taking his time. Yuri had had to push him harder than he’s ever pushed anyone, drive him onto the attack, force him to go faster—and yet they’d tied more than once, stayed neck and neck all the way through to that last point.

He struggles momentarily, again, with the zipper, then the clothes go into the closet unfolded, because what does it matter? The last thing out of his bag is an old comb, the teeth chipped in a few places, one or two gone. He sighs, and because it’s the end of the day, drags the elastic band from his hair and begins to comb it out—down around his shoulders, ends to his collarbone. Hardly regulation. This, too, is more trouble than it’s worth, but he’ll fight anyone who dares ask why he doesn’t just get it cut and save himself the hassle.

 _(Need help, Princess Plisetsky?_ they’d asked him, in the barracks, in the earliest days. _Want us to braid your hair for you?_ But it was all noise and none of them ever touched him. They knew even then that he could wipe the floor with them in the Kwoon three times over—that he’d do it so many times over the next half-year that the Fightmaster despaired of him and all of them eventually lost count of how many times Princess Plisetsky handed them their asses on a platter. Hardly the point of the exercise, but it did what he meant it to do—no one ever touched him.)

“God _dammit_ ,” he mutters, as the comb catches on an especially stubborn tangle. When Otabek glances over Yuri tenses up, on instinct, but in a second he’s looked away again and no words follow. They don’t talk again, the rest of the night.

When Yuri wakes the next morning he rolls over to see Otabek standing by the closet, his back to the beds as he pulls a fresh shirt over his head. Even fresh from a night’s sleep Yuri’s eyes are quick, scalpel-sharp, marking out the path of the mat burn across his upper back. _Three-three. Four-three._ Yuri’s well-aware those throws were entirely unnecessary, but he just wouldn’t stay down.

“Where are you going?” he asks, running his mouth again. He hates himself straightaway for how he sounds in his own ears, raspy and sleep-thick, but Otabek makes nothing of it, simply answers without preamble.

“Just out for a run.”

Yuri’s about to say he should get his burns redressed before he sweats again. He bites down hard on his tongue instead. “All right.”

He tells himself he’s only imagining that Otabek lingers for a second or two in the doorway, half-across the threshold, before he goes.

 

* * *

  
They’ve been living together three weeks when they’re called in for their first sync tests. The notice Yuri finds taped to their door one morning on his way back from his pre-dawn run instructs them to report to Testing Room 6 in the J-Tech wing at 1500 hours. Otabek studies the piece of paper for a few moments and then hands it back without speaking, and they agree perfunctorily to meet back at their room after the noon meal. Later he leads the way mostly by feel; his feet know where to go after following essentially the same paths for six months, though it gnaws the back of his mind that he’s coming as a guinea pig this time. Yuri, too, must know the Shatterdome inside-out, but regardless he trails a few steps behind Otabek with his hands fisted in his jacket pockets.

They don’t talk while they walk. They don’t have too many conversations at all, in their room or ever—neither have the patience for small talk and pleasantries—and for all the momentousness of the occasion Otabek figures Yuri wouldn’t take kindly to _How are you’s_ or _we’ll be fine’s._

When they arrive, Otabek taps in the code that will open up the J-Tech experimental department—the numbers spring to the tips of his fingers so readily he forgets he hasn’t been back in weeks—and the doors part in a blast of cool air to receive them. The whole place is air-conditioned to near-freezing and lit in clinical white, a veritable warren of testing and consultation rooms, pulsing from floor to ceiling with the soft hums of the machines that make up its beating heart. Testing Room 6 is furthest down, to the left. Otabek remembers everything about it, down to the girl they find when they open the door, perched cross-legged on one of the procedure chairs, shock of red curls tumbling over her forehead and into her eyes as she calibrates the pair of Pons headsets they’ll be using for today’s procedure.

 _“Beka!”_ She looks up and all but squeals, delight blooming all over her face—but her expression shifts when she catches sight of Yuri over Otabek’s shoulder, becomes suddenly impish and teasing and wry. “Oh, and you’re here too. The six months out didn’t make you any happier, did it?”

“They didn’t make you any prettier either,” Yuri snaps. All Mila does is grin. “Are we going to do this thing or what?”

“Easy there, tiger. Gotta pay our respects to the boss first.” She turns over her shoulder towards the observation window on the far side of the room, yells in a voice fit to wake the dead, “Peachy! Your prodigal son is home!”

Phichit Chulanont slides almost immediately into view on the other side, piloting a swivel chair that Otabek knows is rolling across the floor of the control room a lot faster than most swivel chairs have a right to roll. He brakes with his hands splayed against the counter, right by the microphone, and bends to speak into it. “You look smaller from the other side of this window, Beka. Or maybe it’s just that beanpole next to you.” He laughs when Yuri rolls his eyes—the mic takes the sound and makes it echo outward, surrounding them, reverberating in their ears—and Otabek feels his mouth twitch the slightest bit, in spite of himself.

“I didn’t think you’d be here personally. Weren’t you drowning in homework?”

“You _are_ homework. Homework straight from Yuuri, no less, so how could I refuse?” Phichit beams at him, radiant through the glass. “But you know I would’ve come out for you regardless. Mila, go ahead and hook them up while I dim the lights to set the mood.”

“Sure, boss.” She holds out one expectant hand. “Gentlemen?”

It’s a familiar enough process to feel mechanical, though Otabek realizes it’s been a while since he was on this side of it. He peels off his shirt, folds it over a few times lengthwise and drapes it over her arm without another word, Yuri stripping down to his undershirt more slowly and with much more reluctance (“Yuri Pirozhki, I can and will peel that tank top off you with my bare hands!”, soon followed by “I’m not going to give you a free show, you old hag!”). Perhaps it’s for the best that Mila’s threats are all noise; the undershirt stays on, and she goes through the rest of the motions with a brisk efficiency her chattiness belies. She helps them into their chairs, makes them recline, attaches the three electrodes across the breastbone that track the rate and rhythm of each subject’s heartbeat. The Pons headset is the last, metal clamps biting cold over Otabek’s forehead and against his temples. After she looks over them once and once again, she takes her leave of them with a jaunty little salute and exits into the control room.

The lights go dim, and Otabek focuses his eyes on the ceiling and does his best to slow his body down, send his mind into the deep. Full-fledged pilots pass through this middle space and enter into full synchronization in a matter of seconds, but this is a first search, and needs to proceed more gradually. Building and entering into the Headspace always feels a little like swimming in open water—too vast to be quite comfortable, too open, nothing to cling to for miles. Then he finds Yuri’s presence, searching out his own, lingering in close proximity but not quite touching yet, and the feel of it is so distinct Otabek knows it immediately.

Yuri’s mind is cold—cold and studded all through with needles. Cold enough to burn. It would only make sense to be afraid, but—

Mila’s voice comes to them from further away than it should, sluggish and disembodied. Otabek knows it must just be because she has to speak into the mic over Phichit’s shoulder, but being so deep in his own head also feels like it’s taken him outside of time. “You’re pulling away, Yuri.”

“It’s so quiet.” When Yuri answers it’s almost in a whisper. No venom, just a little puff of air in a silence he sounds almost afraid to disturb. And maybe there’s wonder too, curiosity. “It’s never been this quiet before.”

“Well, your partner’s not exactly a chatterbox, I’m sure you’ve noticed.” Phichit’s taken back the mic now. “C’mon, let’s get this bridge built. Reach out for each other slowly, and remember, don’t—”

“Chase the rabbit.”

The concept is so deeply ingrained it’s not even a surprise when they finish the sentence in unison. It’s the first thing any recruit who’s made it past officer training learns before they enter the Drift for the first time, to attune themselves to the silence of the Drift and ignore any thoughts or memories that might flare up. A pilot who fixates on a single memory—who chases the rabbit—runs the risk of becoming trapped in it.

The images wash over them—the view from the top of a bunk bed, a pair of reaching arms. An old man in military uniform with a face that looks chiseled from stone, bending at the waist, hand extended. Seagulls. Otabek averts his attention, feels Yuri’s focus pulling him along forward and forward again—like they’re running, one slightly ahead of the other, pulling up into sync until their two minds finally meet and touch, and come together. The first point of contact always feels like a collision, all heat and light and blinding memories, but they continue on. Forward. The bridge steadies and holds.

“Okay, guys, we’re a little shaky, but we’re in. It’s going to take a lot more than one test-Drift to really learn to use the Headspace, I’m sure you know, so for now I’m going to need you to talk to each other. Let’s try the truths game.”

Otabek tells himself he’s been half-expecting this. Communication within the Headspace is faster than words, faster even than a telepathic link because both pilots know each thought as soon as it comes into being, but utilizing it effectively comes with something of a learning curve. Even the most compatible of pairs is likely to differ in terms of mental vocabulary and communication style; in essence, to learn the mind of another is to learn a new language, and this is especially true of pilots who share no common memories or reference points. Speaking aloud allows each pilot to focus their thoughts and helps the copilot learn to read them.

The truths game is a game for strangers. Say something, and have your partner call truth or lie. If you know nothing about each other there’s no way to find the answer but to look into each other’s heads.

“Do we have to?” Yuri’s repulsed by the idea. The crackling in Otabek’s head tells him exactly how much.

Phichit snorts, audibly, into the mic. “It doesn’t have to be a deep, dark secret. You can tell him your favorite color or something. Your favorite food. I dunno.” A sigh. “Beka, could you please?”

“Roger,” Otabek says, and continues without pause, “Phichit Chulanont isn’t my friend.”

Yuri bristles again, then for no more than a second the touch of his mind sharpens, pressing in like a needle. “Bullshit. I didn’t even have to look for that one.” He’s quiet for a while after that, before offering, “My grandfather makes the best pirozhki.”

Otabek knows Yuri’s grandfather, after a fashion—everyone in the Shatterdome knows the hand that feeds them. He knows the old man’s never served pirozhki, because stews and pastas are far more practical fare for an army, sausages or meatloaf or steamed vegetables. But over and above all this Otabek finds he knows, suddenly and with unsparing clarity, who Yuri’s grandfather is _to him,_ how his thoughts’ currents ease up and steady out around the mental picture of the kitchen door. For a moment, it’s almost warm.

“Maybe it shouldn’t count if it’s too obvious.”

“You calling me out?”

“No, I know it’s true. I—” There’s an image that keeps coming back whenever Otabek reaches into Yuri’s thoughts, a disconcerting snapshot of the ocean from above, sharpening more and more with each recurrence. An ocean that blooms black, all bruise-colored but for the furious white crests of the highest waves. It’s his turn, but it feels as if all the speaking has gone out of him. “I—”

Yuri’s thoughts are full of water. When the tide comes in, the overflow will swallow the world. Otabek tries his best not to fixate on what he sees like he’s been taught, not to chase, but finds the inside of his mouth tasting of salt.

“I had never seen the ocean before I came here.”

That’s when he feels it, the panic building like a rogue wave—his, Yuri’s, there’s no telling—crashing into him with so much force he goes blind with it. The impact tears his mind from the Drift, and then they’re blown apart and sinking, and the undertow that surges up from the dark places at the backs of their minds has its claws in them—

Otabek wakes to a cloud of hazy faces—two medical officers he doesn’t know, and a blob he recognizes as Phichit when he can see again. Phichit’s face, Phichit’s hand on his chest pressing him down firmly against the back of the chair when he tries to sit up. It’s Phichit, too, who asks him the awareness questions as the medics take his pulse and check his eyes for any signs of traumatic brain injury. Somewhere—beside him, miles away—he can hear Mila and her own medics doing the same to Yuri as they guide him up into a sitting position. What’s your name, what year is it, where are we right now.

It feels like hours—five minutes? ten?—before the medical officers complete their assessment and pronounce the two test pilots out of danger, merely nauseous and disoriented and in need of a few more minutes of rest. At this point Mila’s removed herself back to the control room, most likely to review and print out the brain scans; once Phichit’s thanked the medical team and dismissed them with a nod, the three of them find themselves alone.

“It was my fault,” Otabek says, before Phichit can ask. “I overstepped.”

Yuri’s head snaps toward him, so sharply it must give him whiplash, and Otabek senses the fear. Yuri’s face is all armored up but it’s in the grooves his nails cut into the palms of his hands, spreading icy-hot all along the underside of his skin. Otabek knows these things—he feels them in his own body without quite knowing how, as if something somewhere remains joined between them, as if they haven’t quite come apart.

“No, it was mine. I broke the neural bridge.”

The unsaid _again_ ghosts in the air above their heads. They all know down to the hard numbers how many times Yuri’s broken the bridge. Each failed attempt thus far has been its own crossroads—give this up, or try again with someone else—but experiments are conducted precisely for the purpose of revealing patterns. You deem results conclusive once you’ve seen them repeated consistently over several trials. Nobody’s yet been able to say how many times is enough, how many repetitions is too many.

“Listen to the two of you. You sound like a pair of greenhorns.” Phichit laughs, but Otabek watches him closely enough to see his eyes harden. “When you’re in there with someone, you’re not just you anymore, so anything that flies or doesn’t fly is on both of you, or neither.” He pauses to breathe out slowly, heavily, scrubbing at the back of his head with one hand. “But maybe we’ve had enough for today—it’s hard enough to Drift with a stranger, and both of you are special cases, to say the least. We can give it a few weeks and try again, if you want to.”

 _For today. For today._ They look at each other, trading uneasy glances back and forth, neither willing to ask aloud about what exactly those words mean—but Phichit knows, just as he knows that neither of them have Drifted with the same person more than once before. Meaning, an entirely new experiment. Meaning, a new place from which to begin.

 _Want_ is such a strange word to use. It’s war, and wanting has no place. It’s the battles that choose for you—or so Otabek had thought, until he’d looked down at Yuri Plisetsky’s name and made a gamble, taken the weight of that risk on his shoulders. Entering the Drift with him had been the same kind of choice. From where they are now, there’s no end in sight.

“I accept.” His _yes_ is faster than thought, and then there are no what-ifs left to regret.

“So do I,” Yuri adds, not to be outdone—but he doesn’t look snappish, for once. He looks overwhelmed. Otabek can hear how his voice has gone small, that way it had in the Drift when he’d wondered aloud at how quiet it was. They’re looking away from each other now, pointedly. “In a few weeks. But if that’s it for today I’d like your permission to be dismissed, sir.”

“Can you even stand up?” Phichit frowns. “Well, if you’re sure. Permission granted. I’d go back to my quarters and get some rest if I were you.” He looks down at Otabek, still lying supine in the chair. “You, I’d like to hang on to just a bit longer, if you don’t mind. Come up to the main lab with me when you’re okay to walk?”

Otabek head moves in a vague assent, but his gaze trains on Yuri as he finds his feet, follows him as he crosses the room—wobbling only the smallest fraction, and only then on the first few steps—and swipes his shirt and jacket from the side table opposite Otabek’s chair, where Mila had left them neatly folded before the test began.

“Sit up slowly,” he mutters under his breath. “Don’t move your head around too much.”

Otabek can only nod again, and continue to watch. There’s no catastrophe in the way Yuri moves; he has himself all together, up to the lift of his chin and the ramrod-straight line of his back, tall and unbreakable as he steps through the door and lets it swing shut behind him without looking back, even once.

 

* * *

  
Word travels fast in the Shatterdome; for all that Phichit and Mila both swear to keep the sync test results strictly confidential—Mila swearing in addition that she’ll put a scalpel through the eye of any of the medics who so much as thought to start up the rumor mill—everyone from the cleaners to the bigshots up in Central Command knows about the broken bridge before the month is out.

To his credit, Yuri only froths at the mouth about it for a day or two. He’s used to it now, being looked at like this, people turning their heads and whispering when he passes. As a result he thinks he should know a thing or two about paradoxes, things that shouldn’t be but somehow are. Somehow Yuri Plisetsky is the brightest star in the sky over Vladivostok. Somehow Yuri Plisetsky is also a burnout, black rock hurtling to earth, falling to pieces in midair. All these things at once are true, and it goes without saying that people love to talk about why.

(Otabek says nothing, as always. Otabek never says much about anything, and outside of the Drift is so implacable Yuri could more easily try to read Greek than decipher whatever it is that he might feel.)

All things considered, then, maybe it shouldn’t be a surprise, the day Victor Nikiforov sends a runner calling Yuri to the big meeting room. Strictly speaking it’s a meeting-place for high-ranking personnel only—the Marshal, her cabal of senior officers, the lead Rangers on-site, though from what he knows even they don’t bother using it much. Most important discussions among the top brass take place in the control room at Central Command, as that’s where the leadership’s needed most and there’s never any time these days to waste gathering everyone up for a proper conference, laying out sandwiches and coffee and all that. The unusual choice of venue by itself should be enough to tip him off. But still he’s jarred, thrown completely for a loop, when he walks through the doors and finds Yakov Feltsman standing at the big round table in the center of the room.

Yuri’s first response, naturally, is confusion. The second, once recognition dawns—and perhaps this too is to be expected—is something that looks more like rage.

“Easiest this way, boy,” is all Yakov says. “I told Lilia you wouldn’t come if we summoned you all the way upstairs.”

Yuuri Katsuki can only smile, sheepish and apologetic, in response to the withering glare that’s almost immediately turned on him. “He tied our hands, sorry.” When Victor shrugs, as if to indicate that having one’s hands tied is a problem for other people, he sighs and amends, “Well, my hands.”

“What do you want?” Yuri turns his ire on Yakov now, brushing off Yuuri’s warning glance, his muttered “Yurio—”, but the old man holds up a hand to silence them both.

“To show you what’s at stake for you. You might not be aware of it, but—”

Yuri interjects before he can finish, for no reason but that he feels enough like a freak already without having to be reminded (again, for the nth time) of the possible consequences of his freakishness. “I know what’s at stake for me.”

“You don’t know a damn thing.” It’s a remarkably restrained response, by Yakov-standards. Yuri well knows that any other day his impertinence would probably have cost him an ear. “You haven’t seen the brain scans.”

Yuuri gestures for him to come toward the table, spread across with a patchwork of printouts that virtually covers its entire surface. He moves a few pages back and forth, searching—Yuri catches sight of his Academy file, and the first page of another that can only belong to Otabek—before he finds the graphs he’s looking for and brings them forward for Yuri to examine. “These are your brainwaves. These are Otabek’s.” Then a third graph. “Here’s your early rate of synchronization, just after forming the neural bridge.”

Yuri’s lines are marked out in red, Otabek’s in blue. He’s used to seeing his own by now—the volatile ebb and flow of his own thoughts, the high-intensity spiking—but Otabek’s are alien to him in every way, deep and slow and penetrating, like a drumbeat. Anyone who didn’t know better would have assumed he’d been asleep all throughout the test-Drift. “It’s—”

“Erratic. Spiraling all over the place from here to the North Pole. Except...” Victor leans over with yet another piece of paper in hand, skimming a fingertip over it, drawing Yuri’s eye toward the end of the page. “Here’s where you start playing Truths.”

“It’s never for more than a handful of milliseconds at a time, but the way you and Otabek line up, the unity between you...” Yuuri, too, watches the lines as if he’s trying to carve out the image of them in his mind. The strain of it is written plain on his face, the effort it must take to convince himself that what he’s seeing is real, that there’s some way to explain it that’s not just some weird hiccup, some wrench thrown into the machine. “Phichit-kun says it’s unprecedented to achieve such complete synchronization, especially between two people who were total strangers until a month ago.”

Phichit’s right on that score, in all likelihood. They’ve all learned a thing or two about brainwaves, had to study them at length learning basic neural bridge ops—with a broken-in pair of pilots you can ramp the sync rates up to a good ninety, ninety-five percent, but no team he’s ever observed has been so fully concurrent with one another as to be able to completely close up that gap. The lines never quite merge. Some ego always remains. It’s the consequence of being a person; you and someone else can’t _really_ be one, even when you’re inside each other’s heads. _What is this, then?_

“Would you look at that? You may not be bonded the way Yuuri and I are,” Victor laughs when Yuuri elbows him in the side, then goes on undeterred, “but there’s definitely something there. Something to work at, if you and your partner are really willing to take a chance on those milliseconds the way Phichit seems to be. The way he says you are.” His next words are piercing, arch, delivered with folded arms and a lifted brow. “He made quite a case for the two of you, you know.”

Yuri thinks about how readily Phichit had said there’d be a next time, how Otabek too had accepted without hesitation. Now he knows just what they all said yes to, that day—it’s a yes that stands, at least for him, but even he can barely believe the audacity of the gamble. Even he has the good sense to be just the faintest shade of incredulous. Milliseconds. _Milliseconds._

“What we need now is the rest of the story.” Yakov shifts the pages around and brings up a final graph. “What happened here?”

They don’t even need to tell him this chart maps the moment he tore out of the Drift. The lines speak for themselves, running together another quarter of the way across the page before they speed up and split apart. “Being inside his head, it’s so quiet, like.” Remembering it makes the cold shoot all through him again. Sweat on the back of his neck, clammy hands clenching and unclenching. “Crazy quiet, like being underwater for a long time. Like he didn’t have anything to show me.” He bites his lip, lightheaded with fear, scrabbling for control. “I thought that would make it easier, and it kind of did in the beginning, but once we were in I couldn’t stop thinking about the ocean. He knew it, too. I’m sure he could see it.”

“You got scared.”

“Scared I was about to start chasing the rabbit,” Yuri snaps. He can’t stand the way Yuuri’s been looking at him, all soft, almost as if he understands. “I had to pull us out.”

Victor makes an appreciative noise—a little hum in the back of his throat, pitched high. “That’s our prodigy. Only you could be so self-aware, Yurio.”

Yuri’s about to take the bait—against his better judgment, as is the case much too often when dealing with Victor, a man of many talents whose greatest skill seems to be getting under people’s skin, turning them inside-out—but he’s distracted by the file that Yakov’s picked up and begun to peruse.

“The silence means Altin’s good at the repression game—no other recruit on record has been so thoroughly able to lock down their memories, so it looks like they’re not bringing anything into the Drift. His file says previous partners have found the experience distressing.” He sighs, flips a page, shakes his head. Yuri knows how old Yakov is, but he’s never actually looked it so much as at this moment—far too old to be trying to sort out anomalies in the brains of his Rangers and Rangers-to-Be. “In normal circumstances those cover-ups would be a problem, but we thought they might make him a good match for you, since you’re similarly tightfisted.”

Which is to say, maybe one basket case deserves another. Maybe they’ll work together if they can’t work with anybody else. Yuri feels his hackles rise; he can tell when he’s being raked over the coals. “But now you want us to get all schmoopy, is that it?”

Yakov reddens. He opens his mouth—and Yuri makes ready once again to say goodbye to his ear—but before he can utter a word Victor is sliding in smoothly, ready to interpose. “Only in a manner of speaking. If you don’t want to go all the way you can stay all buttoned up.”

“What Victor means is you’ll need to open up if you want to Drift again,” Yuuri offers, by way of trying to be conciliatory. He gives Victor a Look. Yuri knows it means there’ll be words between them later, about Victor’s penchant for teasing among other things, because Yuuri’s the only one who can ever get him to do anything close to apologizing for his bad habits. “You might have more in common than you think.”

 _Doubt it,_ Yuri thinks, as he picks the synchronization graphs up off the table, holding them up to the light. How does this even happen? The lines don’t lie, and yet—

“Don’t forget your fundamentals,” Yakov tells him. “Do you know why two pilots are necessary to work a Jaeger?”

 _Like the back of my hand,_ Yuri wants to say. _I only think about it every day._ “It’s impossible to bear the neural load unassisted. The amount of information delivered from the Jaeger to the pilot is so great it needs to be split between two brains—that’s why it’s one to each side, left and right hemispheres.”

“Precisely. Single combat in a Jaeger is impossible in all but the most extraordinary of circumstances, and always the pilots pay for it with their lives.” This entire conversation Yakov’s looked carved out of stone, craggy and staid as the side of a mountain, but as he walks them through their fundamentals there’s a hairpin-crack that opens up. Some spark of pain that flares and just as quickly vanishes. Blink and you’ll miss it, and Yuri’s eyes miss nothing. “You know this, Yuri Plisetsky.”

He does know it. The knowledge cuts him to the quick. “I wouldn’t try to go it alone.”

“Of course not. But that’s why you and Otabek need to be talking more.” For a second Yuri’s worried Yuuri will touch him, extend a hand and hold his shoulder, maybe, or squeeze his upper arm—he pushes the boundary sometimes, with that irritating persistent warmth of his Yuri never asked for and swears up and down he doesn’t want, but even he knows better than to push too hard when things are so tenuous. “Work on your rapport off the bridge. That way you’ll be ready when Phichit-kun calls you in again.”

 _How?_ The question’s on his tongue, but he chooses to shelve it. Instead he closes up, falls back into a regulation answer because there’s no more satisfactory one he can think to give. “Will comply, sir.”

“Very good, cadet. I think that settles things.” Victor looks to Yakov for confirmation, and at his nod inclines his head toward the door. Beyond it they can hear the base buzzing, heavy boots scatting across the floor, the paths of sound they make up and down the corridors. “And, well, there’s the lunch bell. You’re dismissed.”

The three of them don’t look about to join the lunch rush—instead it seems they’ll stay where they are, maybe continue to put their heads together there in the big meeting room with its mess of papers, its improbable patterns—so Yuri takes his leave, carrying his questions down with him to the mess hall. He squares his shoulders and steps through the doors and feels immediately the press of hundreds of eyes. They follow him down the center aisle, up the lunchline.

At the very least, at lunchtime on this day he’s as lucky as he might ever hope to get; the tiny corner table is free, the one wedged into the hall almost as an afterthought, barely big enough to sit two. Yuri kicks out one chair for himself and drops into it, but he’s only just begun to tuck into his steamed cabbage when a shadow falls across him.

“May I?”

Even without asking Yuri already knows—somehow, though he can’t put his finger on _how_ he knows—that right on the heels of his arrival in the mess hall Otabek had come straight here, almost as if he’d known exactly where to find him.

“They’re going to start whispering about you too.” He finds he dislikes this idea more than he should. He doesn’t care one way or another about being an object of gossip—you get used to anything if you want it enough—but even he’s not so callous as to willingly throw Otabek under the bus. Yuri doesn’t know if he might have been, once—if this is genuine concern, or possibly a weakness coming on. “You don’t have to eat with me.”

Otabek considers this, weighing his options in his mind with the same stone-faced gravity he applies to everything else. Yuri’s halfway through thinking about how much Yakov might have loved him, in different circumstances—they seem cut from the same cloth, which is to say the same slab of marble—when Otabek appears to decide _fuck it,_ albeit not in so many words. When he shrugs and sits down in the empty chair, Yuri nearly falls facefirst into the food on his plate.

“Goddammit, man! I already said you didn’t have to eat with me.”

Otabek shrugs again. He’s already unwrapped his sandwich and taken a bite. “You didn’t say I couldn’t.”

“I didn’t say you should!”

Again, Yuri’s met with silence. It’s almost like being in the Drift together again, the way the noise around them seems to recede, and the whole world shrinks all the way down to just this odd, off-to-one-side space they occupy, into which they’re only just beginning to fit.

“You’re my partner,” Otabek says, at last.


	3. let the human in

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Chapter title from "Human" by Of Monsters and Men.
> 
> I would probably die for Marshal Lilia Baranovskaya, true story.

The first order of business before the battle starts: name your enemy.

It goes something like this: breach date 10 June 2021. Kaiju, codename Rusalka, Category 3, sighted at 0400 hours. Agile, serpentine body. Light dorsal armor offset by superior speed quotient. Jagged claws and tail-pincer. Highly toxic.

Lilia Baranovskaya is a woman built like a length of wire—tall and alert and without a hair out of place despite the ungodly hour, bedecked head to toe in sleek military uniform as though she can’t afford letting even this smallest most pared-down command team see her off her game. A woman with gunmetal eyes and a wolf’s walk, pacing the floor as she gives her Rangers their orders. She goes from one end to the room and back again, heels clicking, never still.

“Justice, I want you working to immobilize. Prioritize your heat weapons to contain the kaiju blue.”

“Always the bridesmaid, never the bride,” JJ huffs. You can practically hear his lip curl; Otabek stifles a snort. “You’re cutting us deep, Marshal.”

It’s more than a little insubordinate—the entire room sees Lilia’s eyebrow go up in an eloquent arch—but Isabella’s ready interjections come as dependably as they always have, smoothing any ruffled feathers back down. “The Marshal’s only making sure we play to our strengths. We haven’t yet met a kaiju we couldn’t outpace.”

Otabek wonders if he might miss the two of them. He’s wandered by the J-Tech labs many times since leaving his post in Neural Bridge Ops, for no reason but that his feet know to lead him there when he can’t figure out where else to go. He’s caught them in the simulator once or twice (Phichit, laughing: _Want to run this one, for old times’ sake?)_ and reveled quietly in the chance to watch that synergy he remembers. In those instances he’s found they talk as much as they always have. It’s only just occurred to him that this might be the first time he’s going to watch them fight for real.

“And you’ll need all that vaunted speed of yours to draw the assault.” Lilia clears her throat. “Anticipate direct hostile engagement as soon as you hit the water. Harmony, hold to the rear line and wait to get the jump on it.”

“Just as well,” Victor answers, cavalier as ever. Then a sigh, a long lazy exhale into the comm. “I hate these slippery ones. Let’s hope we can get this over with in time for breakfast.”

Otabek watches Yuri watch the Jaegers as they’re airlifted from their hangars and borne out into the early morning darkness. Right now he’s quiet but hardly at ease, as if it’s _him_ being carried out into battle with a foe he’ll barely be able to see, instead of cocooned up here in the control room on the directive to watch and take notes. The idea that he—that both of them—will ride with this team someday feels distant as the dawn.

Rusalka is there to meet them as soon as they hit the water, lashing out for Justice’s legs with its tail, poised to stab. With the grace of a dancer she sidesteps, arm-blades unsheathed, cutting out at a foreleg and spilling the kaiju blue. But instead of falling back Rusalka presses on with a howl, launching itself at the Jaeger’s chest and digging its claws in. The cries give way to the shrill raking noise of those claws on metal as it scrabbles for purchase; the sound echoes all the way back to Mission Control, making the whole room wince.

“They need to break that deadlock before it gets to the pod,” Yuri mutters. It’s half a throwaway comment, meant for no one in particular; he doesn’t so much as glance at Otabek as he says it, eyes glued to the screens they’re watching the battle from.

Otabek leans a little across the gap between them to peer over his shoulder. “Or their point team can move to intercept.”

Justice pitches slightly, bracing her hands against Rusalka’s sides and fighting to stay on her feet. As if suddenly from a great distance they hear Isabella shout, “Get the tail!”

“They might be caught in the crush,” Yuri points out, prickly from the nerves. From the in-betweenness of his own position too, no doubt. He can see everything from here, up in these high places out of reach of _just_ _anyone,_ but that’s all he can do at this point. Watch, and communicate. Otabek understands how the impotence must chafe at him, and shrugs off the barbs and the peevish side-eyes.

“Not if they’re on their game for coordination. Don’t forget these four are an experienced strike group.”

They already know—have been told enough—how much grit it takes to forge trust between copilots, but strike groups are another animal entirely. There’s no Drift to bind those teams together and enhance their synergy; there’s no way forward but through the fire together, learning each other’s ins and outs from scratch. It either happens or it doesn’t—and if it does, you take each other’s lives and deaths in your hands.

The responsibility’s supposed to sit heavy on the shoulders, Otabek knows. In recent years it’s become common practice not to send out a Jaeger without backup if it can be helped, no matter the kaiju category. To take it for granted that the kaiju are mere unthinking brutes is to court death.

Harmony does step in to intercept eventually, chain sword flexed in one hand, and brings it down to cut across the thin layer of armor covering Rusalka’s back. The blade bites, and the dislodged kaiju falls back, opening up its underbelly for a thrashing from Justice’s arm-blades. It hits the water and disappears beneath the surface—but at the last second the tail whips out, twisting around Justice’s legs and dragging her off her feet. The downed team’s shouts of panic reverberate over the comm.

Up in Central Command the signature winks out on the kaiju tracker. All signs of life gone, but Justice is underwater. The waves are pressing down on her, pounding at her as she tries to rise. Otabek tenses, holding his breath. Beside him Yuri’s hands have curled into claws on the countertop, looking for all the world like they’re about to score the metal.

“Stay on your guard, Harmony Tango,” Lilia orders over Yakov’s shoulder, shifting her attention to the downed Jaeger as soon as they’ve received Victor’s “Copy.” “Justice Jackal, status check. Reply if able.”

“We’re fine.” Isabella sounds more irritated than afraid. Maybe they can count that as a small blessing—certainly they’ll take whatever they can. “Just finding our feet.”

“We’ve got you,” Victor assures her. Harmony waits with her blade in hand. One minute passes, then two, then five as Justice struggles to stand. The kaiju tracker stays blank. Otabek almost lets himself start breathing deep again.

When the signature comes back on, red circles beginning to ripple again without warning on the screen—first in small beats, then faster and faster—Yuri is the first to notice. He whips around in his chair; the warning tears from his throat for all to hear.

“It’s been playing possum, Marshal!”

“Get your goddamn sword up!” Yakov roars, the words resounding across the comm at the exact moment the kaiju bursts above the water’s surface.

Rusalka explodes out of the water on a second wind, leaping for Harmony’s Conn-Pod, but her sword is up to defend just in time. She uses the impact to step back and the blade decompresses, going long and loose and whip-like—Harmony cracks one hand and its coils are snared around Rusalka’s throat.

Caught, Rusalka writhes and wriggles and lashes its body this way and that as it fights to regain control. Otabek can read the rage in every motion. In his peripheral vision Yuri has gone still and pale as a marble column, wide-eyed, sweat running in cold trickles down the side of his cheek. His hands have balled into fists on the countertop and remain there without moving.

“Flank to assist, please!” Yuuri’s voice has gone ragged with barely constrained panic, resounding even between the screeches and wails of the kaiju. As one he and Victor yank at the chain, dragging it forward as they bring one leg up to knee it in the belly, twisting its body around. “You need to make the kill here!”

“You look like you’ve got your hands full, Harmony.” Upright again now, Justice turns and takes two steps toward the kaiju. True to his word, JJ has her chest cannons charged and ready to fire. “Allow us to relieve you.” They home in on the beast’s exposed underside and empty the clip into its flesh—one shot, three, six, until Rusalka’s body hangs severed nearly in half in the coils of Harmony’s whip and the waves run an electric blue.

The signature winks out again, but at Central Command the ensuing silence is strung tight. All eyes on the tracking monitor to see if it’s about to play them false a second time.

“Are we properly in the clear now?” Lilia’s nearly whispering, still half-watching for some kind of disruption in the blankness, her lips pinched tight. Like even she’s not sure she should breathe this thought— _are we in the clear? is it over? is it safe?—_ because you never know, you never really do.

“Good and dead.” Yakov, all stiff and grumbling again, now that they’ve made sure that today’s particular threat at least is neutralized for good. Otabek has to admit, if only to himself, that it had been frightening to see him rattled, however briefly. “Stand by, Rangers. We’ll send the birds to you.”

“Copy,” the four answer as one.

As Yakov pushes his microphone aside and hits the button that will summon the choppers for the return flight, Otabek watches the screens, watches the Jaegers stand knee-deep in the toxic water, the waves lapping at their sides whipped into a frenzy by a storm that’s only just passed. He continues watching Yuri, so fixated, so still—he doesn’t seem to breathe again until the helicopters appear onscreen with their airlift cables lowered, ready to carry the spent soldiers home.

Through the windows, Otabek sees the sky has gone grey, and that the sun is breaking the dividing line of the horizon, a finger-width at a time. Fragile, shimmery bands of gold streaking through the glass, warming the air a fraction. Yuri must notice it too. That’s the only time his hands uncurl, fingers flexing, wrists rotating to dispel the cramp. He pulls them back and wipes his palms down on the legs of his pants when he thinks no one is watching.

 

* * *

 

Even after the attack, Yuri continues telling himself he doesn’t care how Otabek spends his time.

He’s still telling himself this one night two weeks later, two hours after lights out, as he tails Otabek down the corridor to the fire escape and dogs his footsteps down the steel stairs, down and down past the hangars toward the rear garages, where only the deliverymen and the messengers go. Out in the air like this Yuri can see the ocean; it fills the edges of his vision and opens outward all the way to the horizon, scraping at the hem of the sky. As if they need more reminders about where they belong—where they’ll fight, soon enough.

(Ten minutes ago he’d woken up to find Otabek half out the door again. He’d sat up in bed and demanded, in a whisper that scratched at the inside of his throat, “Where are you going?” And when Otabek had half-turned over his shoulder and answered “Come and see,” there had been no choice, really, but to follow. Yuri will throw himself off those stairs into the sea before he admits it, even now, but he’s still got the battle on the brain. When it’s quiet all around his imagination gives him back the sound of the sirens.)

They argue all the way down. Or, rather, Yuri commits himself to talking Otabek’s ear off (“It’s after midnight, what the hell are you doing, do you know how dead we’re going to be if we get caught—”) while Otabek interpolates with the occasional noncommittal hum and exactly once with a “You afraid of getting in a bit of trouble, Cadet Yuri Plisetsky?” that nearly freezes Yuri where he stands, one foot in the air, one still half at rest on the last step, because there’s no way he could have just—did he just—was that a _smile?_

At this point he has exactly zero idea what he’s expecting. Maybe it would be stupid to expect anything. But when they crack open the entry door and find Mila waiting for them, lounging against the wall out of uniform with her arms folded and the greenish emergency light on her fiery hair, Yuri nearly jumps out of his skin anyway.

“About time you showed up, Beka, I’ve been waiting all—” She stops. Glimpses Yuri over Otabek’s shoulder. Grins. “You didn’t say anything about a plus one.”

Otabek shrugs as he enters, Yuri still trailing behind with his tongue in knots from all his protestations. Mila leads the way in, spinning a ring of keys around her index finger, past the messengers’ bikes all in a row until they come to the last. This one Mila unlocks.

“Beka’s a free bird; I just help him out whenever he needs to spread his wings.” She winks, and then the keys are sailing through the air toward the spot where Otabek stands, contemplating the helmet rack mounted on the wall. He catches them without turning his head. “That’s what friends are for, Yuri Pirozhki.”

“You don’t need to wait up,” Otabek interjects, speaking around his hands as he buckles the helmet secure under his chin.

“Oh, count on it! You know the drill, I was never here.”

They trade a look, then, like a wayward lightning-crackle between them; the mischief that gleams in the fanged whiteness of Mila’s smile finds its quieter reflection in Otabek’s eyes, and how strange it is to find that it doesn’t look at all wrong, not at all unbecoming on that face. Yuri feels the urge all of a sudden to grind his teeth to keep his jaw from slackening stupidly, just from the weirdness of it.

Then Mila’s gone, having punched Otabek lightly in the shoulder and reached up to muss Yuri’s hair with one hand as she passed, and they’re left alone with the one unlocked bike and the keys in Otabek’s back pocket.

“You coming?” Otabek asks—but without expectation, as if it’s all the same to him.

Yuri tells himself, several times over, what a bad idea this is. He repeats it to himself like a prayer as he pulls on a helmet of his own and mounts behind Otabek, so fixated on it he barely hears the murmured warnings (“Careful, the pipes are hot,” “watch your feet,” “hold on”): _This is a bad idea, this is a bad idea._ Then Otabek kicks the stand up and they’re on two wheels rocketing out onto the road, and the engine drowns out every single word.

He soon discovers that nothing he already knows—not even with the help of the Drift—could have prepared him for the way Otabek handles a motorcycle. It’s late, and traffic is thin; maybe that’s what makes him throttle up fit to burn up the streets, make the city lights spiral, melt the edges of cars and street signs and buildings into one huge blur.

It takes him a while—ten minutes? half an hour?—to realize that they haven’t stopped for _anything._ By this time they’re over the Zolotoy Bridge, and cutting right under the roar of their passage Yuri can hear the sea’s restless breathing. As they clear the bridge and Otabek turns them toward the center of town Yuri moves, tightening the vice-grip his arms have made around Otabek’s waist, angling his chin over his partner’s shoulder to shout in his ear.

“Where are we even going?” He knows Otabek can hear everything, every last tremor, every hitch in his breath. It’s pathetic, but he supposes that ultimately it’s also inevitable. There are so many different ways to say you don’t want to die.

“You’ll see,” Otabek answers. Or at least that’s what Yuri hears before the engine growls again beneath them and they pick up speed, hurtling nose-first into the wind. Somewhere in between crushing Otabek’s ribcage and gritting his teeth to keep them from clamping down on his own tongue Yuri manages to collect enough of the scattered pieces of his thoughts to string them together: _This was the worst idea._

Otabek takes them up Eagle’s Nest Hill, and stops ( _finally_ ) in the empty parking lot outside the lookout point. Yuri unlocks his arms but doesn’t move, stunned by the ride and by the abrupt, out-of-nowhere silence after Otabek kills the motor. It’s only after Otabek swings one leg over and offers him a hand that he comes back, and then he’s staggering off the rear seat with the helmet still on his head, wobbling from side to side on coltish legs.

“You do this often.”

“Do what?” Otabek’s speech as he locks up his bike is milder than sin.

 _“This!”_ Yuri hisses, once he finally manages to work the helmet free from his head and shove it into Otabek’s chest. “The sneaking out, the going off-base without permission. Do you have any idea how far inland we are right now?”

“Down to the last quarter-mile,” Otabek assures him, without missing a beat. “We’d see it from the top if they raised an alarm, and if we took the backroads I could have us back on premises in a half hour.”

Yuri is certain now, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that Otabek is making fun of him—something he would never even have tried to imagine if he wasn’t at this very second hearing it with his own ears. Or something enough like making-fun to mess with the imagination, though he’s at least gracious enough to hold his tongue about the state of Yuri’s hair, which the ride has mussed and matted into the approximate size and shape of a bird’s nest. He leads the way up the steps to the overlook and lets Yuri do battle with his hair on his own as they walk, raking still-shaking fingers through it from root to tip.

They crest the hill together and cross all the way to the edge of the lookout point, right to where the steel fence circles the cliff’s edge.

“You pulled stunts like this at Kodiak, too,” Yuri says, forgetting whatever ire he had left to spit the minute the memory catches hold of him—and with it too the strange awareness that it’s not one of his, that he only knows it because he saw it in the Drift. The rutted dirt path twisting upward, cutting into the foothills an hour’s ride from the Academy, the grass growing knee-high. Walking alone.

“You already know. It was rougher over there—no paved roads, no parking. And you had to climb partway up a mountain for a view like this.” Otabek must know Yuri has seen most of it by now, even if only in those split-second flashes. It’s been a little easier to hold the neural bridge together, these past few tries, a little less frightening to face each other and not turn away. “Don’t tell me you never snuck out?”

“Didn’t you go to your entrance briefing?” The warnings had been blistering enough to burn off every ear in the room. “Celestino must have harped on it for almost an hour: don’t leave town, don’t drive off the road, there are bears.”

“Ah, right. I remember the bears. Biggest bears in the world, he said. The way he went on about them you’d think they were scarier than the kaiju.” Otabek kicks gently at the fence with his boot, toeing at the gap between the rails, shaking it up a little. “And that’s what kept you on-site every day, like a good soldier? The local wildlife?”

“Of course not.” Yuri snorts, when in truth he wants to laugh. He can feel it simmering, effervescent in the hollow of his chest. _The local wildlife._ But that would be too much, so he brings up one hand and coughs into his fist instead. “I just never had a reason.”

Otabek considers this. “From high up you could see all the way out to the harbor. People closing up shop, walking home from school. And all the ships on the water.” Yuri’s seen these images too, but it’s not the same as talking about them, of course. Not the same as listening to Otabek say what they mean. He knows at least that much. “It helped me to see those things, I think. It still does, now, to come here.”

He thinks maybe he can understand that. You do whatever you need. For some of the more restless kids at the Academy that meant going out into town on Sundays, to see a movie, find a girl, post a letter home. To do what real people did, for just that one day. They said it helped them fight, but Yuri remembers knowing very early on that the only thing that would help him fight was to do it, and then to do it again. And Sundays were the only days there wasn’t a line for the simulator. _Who cares. Who cares, what real people do._

Yuri doesn’t know what it is, but he’s less skittish up here. Like there’s more room for every motion, and more time—like he might set aside his thorns, if he chooses. Otabek, too. “You know,” he says, taking a chance. “I’ve never looked at the city from inland like this before.”

“No? Haven’t you always lived here?”

“Since I was twelve.” Before that, at Headquarters in Moscow—but maybe there’s no need to fill in that gap. It’s possible Otabek’s already seen it. That’s the trouble with sharing a mind; it becomes a puzzle, figuring out what you can take for granted as already known. “But I never got out much.”

“You’ve been a square all your life, then.”

“Fuck off,” Yuri says.

It’s his own words that break him, squeeze the laughter from his chest—then it’s on his lips, then it’s in the air, and while he listens to this foreign variation on his own voice he thinks about what a bad idea it is, to let himself laugh like this and get lost. Too high-risk, too reckless, reckless gets you killed.

“Look at the lights,” Otabek tells him, as if he knows Yuri’s never seen them. _Look,_ like Yuri needs to ascertain the reality of this image for himself, see how it holds for more than just this one night of quiet. “All those people still awake.”

Viewed from this distance Vladivostok is a world in miniature, where the horizon looks closer than it is, and the sky arcs up and backward over everything like the curve of a glass jar, enclosing. When he looks out at that world, at all the small lives in their small houses and the bridge stretched out flimsy as a spiderweb across the bay, and still further out at sky and sea and the bottomless beyond, Yuri almost feels the ground pitch beneath his feet. He’s about to lose his balance and fall right down, toward the lights on the ground that shine on more stubbornly than the stars.

Yuri takes a step closer to Otabek, toward the strange voice that keeps him at anchor, before he answers. “Yeah, like every night. It’s nothing special.”

They look up together. The stars are dim because they’re far away. Because they’re far away, they’re safe.

Otabek chuckles, soft and low, leans his elbows on the rail and bends his body toward the city that sprawls below them—alive somehow, in spite of the endless odds. “The point isn’t whether or not the people are special, Yuri. The point is whether or not they’re dead.”

 

* * *

 

Standard operating procedure for a successful kaiju intercept goes like this:

Shatterdome sensors are calibrated to sense kaiju activity from the moment it emerges from the breach at the bottom of the deep ocean. As soon as its trajectory and targeted coastal city are determined, the Defense Corps deploys strike groups of at least two Jaegers from the nearest Shatterdome able to respond. The Jaegers engage the kaiju in the shallow waters offshore, along the continental shelf, in order to intercept and kill them before the beasts reach their target. Experience has shown that the ideal cordon distance for a successful kaiju intercept is ten miles offshore.

Should the kaiju incapacitate, destroy, or evade the deployed Jaegers, the feasibility of executing a successful intercept before it makes landfall drops considerably. Hence, the last-ditch perimeter within which a kaiju might be prevented from reaching land is known as the Miracle Mile.

It’s relatively rare that Jaegers or strike groups are deployed for the express purpose of defending the Miracle Mile, much less engaging the kaiju on land, where damage to populated areas is inevitable. But it’s also standard operating procedure for Rangers to be prepared for any eventuality, and to develop over the course of lull periods an expansive repertoire of battle strategies, high-liability emergency situations included.

Yuri and Otabek enter the virtual field of battle as the kaiju breaks the shore of Vladivostok’s eastern peninsula. This is their first run in the simulator, and their adversary—Category 3 Rusalnaya, essentially Rusalka redux—is as speedy as they remember but less aggressive without the cover of water. On land its behavior is taunting, evasive—always running, ducking around buildings and slipping just out of reach. All the more destructive for the surrounding environment, they soon discover as they tail it through the city; Rusalnaya likes to devastate, pulling down buildings and flinging cars into the air to impede their pursuit.

“I hate inland sims,” Yuri grumbles. Thorns pricking at the back of Otabek’s mind, quick and sharp. “No kaiju should even make it in this far.”

Yuri makes a lot of noise about bad ideas. Otabek would be used to it by now, but it’s still a touch disorienting to hear the noise in his head before it’s even given words. “It’s good to have all bases covered.”

“In what instance would a strike group worth its salt actually let this happen, Otabek?”

They know from their night rides—“sneaking around,” Yuri still calls them, for all his complicity, while Otabek himself prefers “reconnaissance”—that the city is backloaded, most of its inhabitants having moved as far from the shore as they could manage, past the bridge, on the inland side of Eagle’s Nest Hill. They have to keep the kaiju cornered on the mostly derelict Eastern peninsula, which juts out furthest into the sea opposite the Shatterdome itself. If they let it move further inland—destroy the bridge and cross the Zolotoy Rog—they may as well give up.

“Maybe it evaded the point team,” Otabek says, gravely. It’s no small feat to hold a poker face when you’re trying to chase a kaiju through a city without accidentally crushing houses underfoot, even in virtual reality, but somehow he manages it. “Or maybe it finished them off.”

“What kind of shitty point team... Don’t say things like that with a straight face.” It sounds like a warning, but Yuri’s just shy of laughing out loud. Otabek can hear it, if not feel it in the back of his own throat.

The cold absolute silence of their Drift has, over the last few sychronizations, eased up little by little; it hums now with a warm and easy flexibility, holding their two consciousnesses together. It’s tempting to listen to that humming and get drunk, fall into the fantasy that everything is going according to plan, but both of them are well-aware that the odds are stacked against them for this particular battle. They’ve taken the fight into a populated area and they’ve got to keep their footing sure.

They’re working now at driving the kaiju backwards, toward the coastline, corralling it in the abandoned industrial district at the water’s edge. Their simulated Jaeger is a smaller-than-average Mark-3, light and quick and maneuverable to make up for deficits in armor and power. They finally corner Rusalnaya by the seawall, heading it off from behind and pinning its tail beneath her feet to immobilize it. They’ve seen this before, but without the benefit of Harmony Tango’s chain sword they have to wrangle barehanded, delivering a flurry of punches to the head and throat.

They don’t realize right away that Rusalnaya has begun to tear its tail from its body—they can’t quite place the noise they hear, the high keening and the ripping flesh, the sickening crunch they feel like a tremor beneath their feet—until it writhes and twists away from them and its blood runs blue over the stones of the street. It doesn’t hesitate for a second, pivoting on its rear legs and launching itself at them straight away, smashing the Jaeger back-first into a row of empty factories. Then it’s on top of them, scrabbling upward to bite at their Conn-Pod.

“What the _fuck.”_ Yuri’s winded, but at least he isn’t panicking. Or angry, which might be worse, because then neither of them would be able to see straight; Yuri’s rage turns Otabek’s vision red, fiery scarlet spots blooming before his eyes like blood splatters.

“It’s called autotomy.” The word comes easy. He finds it waiting—a high school biology classroom word, a word from another life. It’s oddly centering to say it, even here, staring up through the thrice-reinforced panes of glass between the Conn-Pod interior and the kaiju. It makes the thing real—scales and claws and flesh that dies when it’s killed. “Self-amputation. Animals under threat do it all the time.”

Yuri huffs, having regained his breath. “Nerd.”

The talk is unnecessary. It’s a rookie tactic, communicative training wheels—use your mouths when you’re not sure how to use the Headspace, to stay calm and focus the thoughts. Maybe one day they won’t need it anymore. But at this moment, with Rusalnaya hovering openmouthed over their Conn-Pod, poison dripping from its jaws, the echo of their voices in the half-dark is strangely calming to Otabek. He breathes in, feels his mind clear, and then—

“Yuri, the—”

“Plasmacaster.” On whatever field of battle you think to place him, Yuri Plisetsky is always two steps ahead. “I see you, I see you.”

One of the Jaeger’s arms goes up as Rusalnaya’s head goes down, the metal fingers opening up and folding backward to reveal the plasma cannon already charged up and glowing. Yuri swings an arm and shoves it muzzle-first into the gaping mouth and fires, burning the kaiju up from the inside at point-blank range. Once the clip is empty they roll atop the carcass and bash its head once, twice, three times into the surrounding debris for good measure, ending the simulation once the computers confirm the kaiju dead.

They’re quiet together in the test pod as their assessment report scrolls across the HUD. The AI announces their progress in the same flat voice Otabek had once been used to hearing every day: **Battle duration 110 minutes. Collateral damage sustained 5.22 km 2. Spread of kaiju blue contamination 10.34 km2. Simulation complete. Humanity stands. **

They feel Phichit sever the Neural Handshake; the Drift goes down, but something of the humming remains. They look at the screen again and then across at each other, and Otabek swears he’s not imagining it when he sees Yuri grin, teeth flashing lightning-quick behind his helmet’s face-shield.

“I’ve never scored so high for inland before.” Yuri sounds, just for a second, incredibly young.

“Even with the history-making fifty-one kills?” Otabek reminds him, amused. He’s held those numbers in his head for months now, and he’s not about to let Yuri forget how much trouble they’ve caused since then. “You should have seen Phichit’s face when he read me your file.”

“Ah, well. That was different.” Otabek can’t say for sure, here in the semidarkness of the test pod, but he thinks Yuri might even be a little embarrassed. It’s the first name he thinks to put to the feathery sensation he feels in the pit of his stomach, twin to whatever Yuri must feel as he speaks. “I rode solo for all of those.”

Neither of them are alone now, but there are some things you just don’t say.

“You’re clear, Team Problematic.” The communication line to the control tower crackles to life, as if to make it abundantly clear that Phichit’s been listening in on their conversation the whole way through. Otabek can see him so clearly in his mind’s eye, leaning back in his chair as he pencils the figures onto his clipboard for official encoding later. A grin on his face sunny enough to light up the sky. “Not bad for a first drop.”

“Do you think it’s snowing in hell, Boss?” Otabek catches the curious look, but decides he’ll leave Yuri to find the explanation in his head if he wants it so much. Maybe it’s enough that they both know a little about how it feels, now, to have made the impossible happen.

“Oh, yeah.” Phichit laughs as he remembers. “Yeah, for sure it is.”

 

* * *

  
One thing Yuri’s sure nobody knows is that after the first time there’s no foretelling the outcome of a sparring bout with Otabek. Even on the floor here, now, he can do nothing but think from movement to movement.

Yuri pivots on his heel and puts his staff up, going for the shoulder. The next thing he realizes Otabek has ducked low and clipped his ankles. One moment he’s fixed on Otabek’s eyes, fiery and dark and level on his face. The next he’s staring at the ceiling, and the mats on the floor of the Kwoon are warm and sweat-slicked beneath his back.

Otabek leans on his staff, glancing down as he dashes the sweat from his forehead. “This one’s mine.”

“You blindsided me.” It’s sour grapes and he knows it, but also he hates that no one on-site would ever believe that stone-faced Otabek Altin could look or sound so smug.

“Anyone would have to, to get you off your feet,” Otabek counters—but he lets the words trail, his gaze going up and over Yuri’s head to fix on something he can’t see. Yuri needs to turn to follow it, glancing backward, but the last thing he expects to find is Yuuri Katsuki in the doorway, smiling out at them with his arms folded across his chest.

“What are you doing here?” Yuri scrambles to his feet. His next impulse is to crane his head around, searching for a presence he knows should be there. “Where’s—”

“He has business at Central Command. Don’t worry, it’s just me today.” Yuuri is as loose as this balmy July afternoon, relaxed and affable, without his partner’s penchant for riling Yuri up with unnecessary small talk and snippy remarks. “I have a present for you both.”

 _A present._ The two junior pilots trade looks, pointed and questioning, before Otabek picks Yuri’s fallen staff off the floor and returns it to the rack along with his own. Yuri, meanwhile, shoves his feet back into his boots, kneeling to tie his laces and forcing himself to go slow.

“What’s this about?”

“This morning we got word from the engineering team that they’ve finally finished refurbishing your Jaeger.” Yuuri waits only long enough for both of his juniors to get their shoes and jackets on before he turns and sets off at a clip down the hall. They keep pace with him all the way to the elevator, Yuri striding long, Otabek trailing at his shoulder more slowly without speaking.  “In light of your progress the past month, the Marshal’s given me the go-ahead to officially introduce you.”

A question grows in the back of Yuri’s mind at the odd choice of words words— _finally, refurbishing—_ but he defers asking as they board the elevator up to the main hangar.

When they come out into the gigantic dome all the noise and the life and the jarring flurry of it washes over him. He doesn’t think he’ll ever get used to it, how everything here is larger and louder than in the rest of the base, in the rest of the _world._ Too many things happening in the same place at once—the techs scurrying back and forth, engineers barking orders at one another across the bay, ceiling doors opening to let in the cargo helicopters. To say nothing of the Jaegers, which appear always a little mythical, a little larger-than-life. Right away they spot Harmony Tango’s blue and silver in the central bay, regal and unmistakable, beside her Justice Jackal’s fierce red and black, but—

Otabek seems to catch Yuri’s thought. “Just those two?”

“Yours is still in the test bay around the back. Victor didn’t want it moved out until after the unveiling.” Yuuri shrugs, that peculiar Victor-only smile pulling at the corner of his lips—loving and exasperated by turns, but so utterly broken-in it’s as if his mouth now falls naturally into that shape. “Surprises, you know.”

“Figures,” Yuri mumbles to himself, but presses on with the rest until they come to the doors to the adjoining hangar, smaller than the ones at the main entrance. Yuuri taps in a code and the doors part to let them in, shutting behind them so quickly Yuri feels the cold rush of the air nip at his heels. The corridor that greets them on the other side twists around, narrow walls pressing in until it’s hard to see ahead—then they round the corner and come out into the bay proper, and Yuri is floored.

He’s seen more fighting mechs than he can count since the inception of the Jaeger program, but he’s always told himself that none of them have ever held a candle to the one that stands before him now—lovely, lethal, slender as a dancing girl. Built smaller than any Jaeger he’s ever seen before or since, but faster, too, so quick and so light on her feet they barely seem to touch the ground. For sure it’s her. He’s convinced he’d know her anywhere.

“I didn’t exactly have it right earlier,” Yuuri admits quietly, and it’s only when he hears his voice coming from behind that Yuri realizes he’s taken the extra steps forward. “Maybe I should have said ‘reintroduce you.’ Gentlemen, this is Mark-1 Astra Nova, newly restored.”

“Is that really...?” Otabek’s murmuring voice is also behind him and to one side, but Yuri still hears his breath hitch in awe.

“It’s got to be. She’s one of a kind.” Yuri turns, blinking the light out of his eyes, grappling for some semblance of coherence. “How did you...?”

“She’s been under repair in Shanghai three years now, about. A year under the Marshal’s lead engineers for the restoration proper, but it’s the sons who have done most of the upgrade work.” Yuuri nods toward the sketched outlines of two figures standing at the Jaeger’s feet and picks up his pace, overtaking Yuri and Otabek again even as he gestures to them to follow. “C’mon, c’mon. You’ll want a word with them, I’m sure.”

They trail deeper into the hangar behind Yuuri, shoulder to shoulder. When they draw up to Astra Nova’s base Yuuri introduces the pair of young men in mechanic’s overalls as Leo de la Iglesia and Guanghong Ji, both newly promoted to senior engineering posts after their work in Shanghai. They greet Yuuri with an easy familiarity, and though their salutes to Yuri and Otabek are considerably less chirpy—that much more reserved, that much more aware of standard protocol—their smiles hold.

“You’ve done good work,” Otabek offers, with a generosity Yuri finds it’s impossible to get his own tongue around, standing so close. “She looks like new.”

“We just inherited the project, but it’s been an honor to work on her.” Leo beams at them, hands in his pockets. When he tips his face upward to turn the full force of that smile on the machine, there’s no mistaking the love behind it, fit to light the whole hangar from floor to ceiling. “She’s an old girl, but she’s cleaned up really well. I’m sure she’ll do more than hold her own.

“What you’re looking at here is the newly reinforced hull.” Leo points upward; Yuri follows his hand with his eyes all up the front of the Jaeger, taking in the shining silver he remembers from his childhood, the fine gold detailing on her chest and limbs. “Inside you’ll find the Conn-Pod completely refurbished to make use of the most up-to-date tech, in line with PPDC specs—navigation and digital readout functions for the HUD, updated circuitry and hydraulics systems for enhanced responsiveness and fine motor control. New double-core nuclear reactor with extra shielding; my pops was pretty anal about that, said he wouldn’t want you getting a ton of cancer.” He winks, and claps Guanghong on the shoulder. “And thanks to this guy here she can pack a pretty big payload in her own right.”

Yuri looks at Guanghong Ji and thinks he can’t be more than seventeen. He looks like a little boy playing at being a weapons specialist, with the goggles on his head slightly askew and his mechanic’s suit rolled down to the waist. The grease streaks across his shirt and forearms say otherwise, though, as does the ruddy map of burn scarring on his slender ungloved hands. Those are hands that have set to the work, hands that know what they’re doing.

“Want to get a closer look?” He grins at them, indicating with the angle of his head the automated lift by the far wall and the maze of ramps and catwalks above. “I can take you guys up and tell you what she can do from there.”

Yuri can’t help a glance at Yuuri, not so much for permission as some kind of assurance that this boy won’t bite—but the nuance flies right over the older man’s head, typically.

“Why not? She’s yours. Go get acquainted.”

Leo laughs and thumbs fondly at what looks like an ash-smear across his partner’s cheek. “Try not to get carried away, Guanghong.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Guanghong answers tartly before setting off, beckoning over his shoulder. “Rangers, this way, please.”

They leave Leo and Yuuri chatting amiably about touching up Harmony Tango’s paint job and follow Guanghong onto the lift. He taps some buttons on the control panel and it begins to move upwards, Yuri pitching slightly on the first rise and proceeding straightaway to white-knuckle the handrail.

On the way up Guanghong fills their heads with a stream of weapons-talk that’s so detailed it feels endless—how they had wanted to capitalize on Astra Nova’s already superior range and mobility, improve the speed and variation of the melee strikes she could perform. “Leo’s too shy to take credit for his work, but the rear jets we’ve added were totally his idea. They’ll give you the additional acceleration you need for high kicks, as well as jumps and flips, even in the water. The extra-flexible cables and additional diesel engines per muscle strand are all Leo, too.”

Still smiling that implacable smile, Guanghong points across the bay, to the Jaeger’s right arm. “If you feel like changing it up a bit in hand-to-hand combat there’s the retractable arm-blade built into the right gauntlet; think of it like an arm-mounted longsword rather than Justice Jackal’s two short ones. Heated, of course, to cauterize the flesh and prevent kaiju blue contamination, but on top of that I thought it would be nice to add in a vibration generator. The shockwaves are designed to trigger on impact, so you can be sure it’ll turn even the tiniest, most glancing blow into a gaping wound.”

“Ah,” is all Yuri can manage, dry-mouthed, when Guanghong perks his head at him in slight expectation. He coughs a little into his fist and adds, as a kind of afterthought, “Academy Weapons Dev doesn’t talk much about vibroblades.”

“Nope, not at all. The tech’s too new. This one’s pretty much my own invention.” Guanghong pauses a moment to look at the arm and all its lethal, invisible secrets with all the pride and affection of an especially giddy new father—but then he remembers the next thing and rattles on, to Yuri’s disbelief. “Last are the good old Plasmacasters, one in each hand. Not so flashy as the vibroblade in terms of upgrades—what we’ve done is improve her firing protocol to reduce the charge time, and add more shots to the clip. I’m pretty sure no kaiju could survive a full volley now.”

Yuri glances at Otabek, then at Guanghong, then the Jaeger. He chews pensively at the inside of his cheek, trying to account for all the means this machine suddenly has of causing pain, wondering if in the thick of battle he’d be able to remember them all.

Otabek, though amused, is only marginally more articulate. “That’s an impressive arsenal.”

“I’m glad you think so. You should have no problem riding with the big girls in the main hangar now.” Guanghong’s eyes shine under the harsh overhead lights as the lift rises, closer and closer to the summit. “I hope you love her as much as I do. She’s the most beautiful death-dealing pain-instrument I’ve ever worked on.”

“She is that. Beautiful, I mean.” Otabek knows now to speak for Yuri and himself, and Yuri’s willing to bet the cost of all those state-of-the-art upgrades that they have the same idea as the lift creaks to a stop. “Is the Conn-Pod open?”

“Of course. Go on in and look around.” Guanghong gestures at the catwalk opening out right in front of them before plopping down on one of the platforms, legs dangling, heedless of the sheer vertical drop down to the floor below. “I’ll wait for you here.”

With only the faintest look of concern Otabek nods, gesturing for Yuri to go before him. In single file they pick their way across the zigzagging path from the lift to the Jaeger, circling around to find the entry door in the back of its head.

On the threshold, on the very edge, Yuri feels his own head start to spin; he pauses there, hesitant, gripping the handrail. He remembers, so vividly it appears less like a true memory now than an out-and-out dream, something that couldn’t ever have been real—his mother leading the way through what can now only be the ghosts of those doors, his father putting out one hand to steady him by the arm. _Easy. Easy, Yurochka. Go slowly. Watch your feet._ He remembers the interior, holding himself as still as he knew how and feeling the living pulse of the machine all around him, like the heartbeat of the Earth itself.

Something light rests, suddenly, against his back, a warm spot flowering between his shoulderblades. Otabek’s hand. Following it, Otabek’s voice over his shoulder, calling him back to himself, bringing him back down. “She’s been waiting for you.”

Yuri looks down at the hangar, at the near-invisible dotty outlines of Yuuri and Leo far below them; up at the lights that sear his eyes, and then forward again at the Jaeger, as though to fix its image as real in his mind. One hand on the door in front of him, he screws his eyes shut. Takes a breath, two, calling every nerve in his body to attention. Then he turns, and with the full force of his gathered courage looks his copilot square in the eyes.

“C’mon,” he says, too cocky by half, praying all the while that without the Drift up Otabek won’t be able to call his bluff. “She’s been waiting for us.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> negl I've been hiding Leo and Guanghong up my sleeve for more than a month and I'm so happy they finally exist
> 
> Thank you for sticking with me through to 50% completion! The next chapter is going to be a bit of a doozy (and that's putting it mildly), so please look forward to it.


	4. what the water gave me

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This is the part where Things Go Horribly Wrong.
> 
> Title from the eponymous song by Florence + the Machine, which was echoing eerily in my head all throughout the writing of this chapter.

Maybe it’s the early hour, but Otabek’s turn through the Drivesuit Room on the morning of Astra Nova’s first test run is almost more than his senses can handle. In a matter of minutes he and Yuri are herded through the doors and stripped down and shoved into the circuitry suits, which sit so close to the skin he can’t help wondering—vaguely, between two or three minor electric shocks from the synaptic processors sewn into the fabric and an accidental elbow to the ribs—if they’ll cut off circulation.

But no, the head Drivesuit technician assures him, the suits are always made to measure to ensure they’re as snug as possible. He checks the fit himself, skimming his hands over Otabek’s shoulders, down the center of his back where the spinal clamps will go. “Mm, good. _Very_ good. Not an inch of wiggle room. Fits you like—”

“A second skin—we get it, we get it!” Yuri snaps before Christophe can finish. He’s chafing in more ways than one, covered neck to fingertips to toes in the black polymer fabric. “You don’t have to get all handsy, god.”

Christophe purses his lips, lets loose a teasing whistle. “Don’t pretend you don’t wish these were your hands, Yuri Plisetsky. Neither of you are my type, just so we’re clear.”

“Go back to suiting up the old geezers, then.”

It’s common knowledge around the base that Christophe and Victor are old friends, and that the former always personally oversees pre-deployment suit-ups for the latter and for his partner. Yuri looks like the thought is going to turn his stomach. Otabek bites at the inside of his cheek to keep his face flat.

“Old geezers who appreciate my art, which is much more than I can say for you, little boy.” When Christophe laughs it echoes all around the room and makes the eye-rolls and the death-glares slide right off him; he turns over his shoulder to motion to the team of junior techs milling about, entirely unperturbed. “Come on, come on, boys; bring the armor.”

Astra Nova is an atypical Jaeger in her slender build and light coloration, and her pilots’ armor is the same, sleek silver plating veined all through with gold. They face one another and stand still as the techs fit the pieces together and screw them in, but even with the helmet secure on his head and its visor shielding his face Otabek has to resist the temptation to bring a hand up to shade his eyes. He wonders if it looks as strange on them as it feels, this unusual brightness. Under the clinical white light they practically glow.

“What a pair of proper soldiers you two make. I’m so proud of myself I could cry.” Christophe stands back to survey his handiwork, making a big show of wiping away an imaginary tear before he hits the button that will open the exit door. For good measure he pulls a lacy handkerchief from his back pocket to wave after them as they depart. “Your Conn-Pod is across the bridge. Step lively, now!”

Yuri’s two steps ahead as always, but halfway through the door he stops and lingers, waiting for Otabek to draw up beside him until they stand shoulder to shoulder. His gaze is focused inward at the pair of harnesses hanging in the center of the cockpit. They haven’t practiced where to stand; Otabek knows the question before he can open his mouth.

He doesn’t tell Yuri to take the lead because it’s where he belongs. Instead he walks into the pod and takes the left place, and lets that speak for itself.

“I didn’t think I’d ever see her again,” Yuri tells him later, after the techs have hooked them both in and set the harnesses to test mode. The Conn-Pod is different when it’s awake like this, the head of the machine all lit up and humming around them. Otabek remembers how quiet it was, the first time they ever entered it—all the panels dark, the air inside still and waiting—and that first time had already been overwhelming enough.

“I know,” he says.

**Two pilots onboard and ready to connect.**

As if on cue, the communication line crackles to life, the last lights come on, and the HUD opens out before their eyes. Astra Nova is fully woken up now; one of her screens looks in on Mission Control to show them what a full house they have for today’s demo. Their eyes sweep the room from left to right—passing over Victor and Yuuri, Yakov, the Marshal herself, Phichit Chulanont grinning up at them from the command chair.

“Good morning, Astra Nova. Ready to take your baby for a spin?”

Otabek knows Phichit, how he gives Central Command a wide berth barring an official summons from the Marshal to oversee an operation. He much prefers working on the ground—with the new recruits in the psych consulting rooms, in the simulators, in the labs. “Mission Control looks good on you, Boss.”

“Anything for my problem kids.” He looks directly into the camera and winks before turning to where Lilia stands behind him with her arms folded. “Waiting on your go-signal, Marshal.”

“We’re ready, Dr. Chulanont,” she confirms. Her eyes look straight ahead. “Go ahead and engage pilot-to-pilot protocol.”

“Yes, ma’am.” Phichit throws a switch, punctuates his next words with a few sharp taps to the buttons studding the control panel in front of him. “Ladies and gentlemen, Marshal Baranovskaya and Deputy Commander Feltsman on-deck. Initiating pilot-to-pilot connection sequence. Rangers, prepare for Neural Handshake.”

The numbers flash across the HUD in front of them to signal the start of the countdown, going backwards from fifteen. The two in the Conn-Pod trade a look— **thirteen, twelve, eleven—** before Yuri leans forward to speak into the comm for the first time in his official capacity as right-hemisphere pilot of Mark-1 Jaeger Astra Nova. Otabek imagines he’s smiling behind the visor.

“Astra Nova, ready to align.”

This part they know back to front by now. Relax, lean back, listen to the AI count down from **five, four, three, two, one.** **Initiating Neural Handshake.** Then they’re in, dropping through the cold inflow of the Drift into each other’s heads.

**Right hemisphere calibrating. Left hemisphere calibrating. Ready to activate the Jaeger.**

“Neural Handshake strong and holding. Looks like you know how to turn it on.” At his station Victor laughs, amused and admiring. “You can go ahead and proceed with movement tests.”

This is a pattern that ought to be easy to follow. They know how to go through all these motions. Move the fingers, open the hands. Clench the fists. Rotate the arms. They’ve practiced all of it more than once, and all told there’s not too much of a difference between syncing up with a real Jaeger and a simulated one. The best way to describe it is as an added weight, a heightened awareness that the three are one and together and indissoluble. They feel Astra Nova, all around them, the weight and presence of her pressing in on their linked minds like a promise.

They end in boxing stance, hold for four counts before they bring the hands down, opening up the palms in time to the AI’s prompting. **Calibration complete.**

_(“Kaiju signature rising! It’s been playing possum, Lilia!”_

_“Astra, we’ve still got a signature! That kaiju is still alive!”_

_Yuri stands to one side of the control room, eyes fixed on the video feed playing out on the main monitor, barely breathing. He’s watching when the long serrated horn sinks to the hilt into Astra Nova’s Conn-Pod, watching when the beast jerks its head and the entire left half comes free in a shower of sparks and shattering glass and twisted metal and somewhere in the middle of it all his father’s broken body, hurtling down and down into the black water._

_He’s listening, too, to the roars of the beast and to the panic exploding around him as Central Command descends into chaos, to his mother screaming “Sasha, Sasha,_ Sasha” _before her transmission cuts out.)_

The full force of the memory catches Otabek by surprise; the momentum throws his body backward as his pulse spikes and the alarms begin to sound. All around him the darkness is gathering, making his vision tunnel, hooking its claws into him and dragging him back into the past.

_( **Plasma cannon loading. Ready to fire.**_

_“Marshal, Astra’s still online! Nadia has her in hand!”_

_“Don’t look, Yuri—Yuri, I said don’t_ look _—”)_

“Astra Nova, your right hemisphere is out of alignment,” Lilia says into the main microphone, quite calm and utterly in control, like she’s been waiting for this. But Otabek can hear it, how every nerve in her body has wound itself tight, pulled itself to snapping point and stopped there on the edge—because if she can’t hang together, nothing else will.

“Yuri, your memories.” Yuuri speaks up. Soft, almost pleading. “Stay with us, stay here.”

_(Single-pilot control of a Jaeger is all but impossible for anyone but the most extraordinary of individuals in the most extraordinary of circumstances. Even such people are likely to pay for it with their lives, overwhelmed to the point of death by the neural load._

_You can’t ride without a copilot, Yuri knows. You always need two. But he makes the mistake of hoping all the same, as he stands in the control room and watches his mother bring the shattered remains of Astra Nova back to shore alone. He reaches across the water with his own mind, too small, and the world outside too vast and violent:_ Come home, come home, come home.

 _He knows he’ll later forget who catches hold of him at the moment that Astra Nova breaks the shore, going down on one knee, then the other—and then she’s falling forward and won’t stop, doesn’t stop until she’s down like a corpse in the sand. Maybe it’s Yuuri. Maybe Victor, wrapping thrice-reinforced steel arms around and pressing Yuri’s face into his chest, muttering_ Don’t look Yuri don’t look don’t look _again and again and again in his ear. He can’t tell; their voices are one with the high-pitched siren-wail that’s building in his head, and that, too, does not stop.)_

Yuri in the now—the real Yuri, past all the flashing images, the true Yuri—answers through clenched teeth. Leaning back, letting the harness take his weight, nearly off his feet from the effort of it. “Just let me calm down. Just—just let me control it.”

He will. He’ll come back before too long. Otabek knows this; he’s seen Yuri grit his teeth, throw himself against all that would grind him down more times than he can count.

_(Later Yuri will only remember two things about the day of the funeral—the sound of the trumpets, and a loose thread in one corner of the burial flag._

_That’s a lie. There’s a third thing: it’s snowing on the day Yuri buries his parents. He sees the flakes settle in his hair, on his shoulders, on the backs of the hands that hold the flag, and remain there without melting._

_Nadia and Sasha Plisetsky, PPDC Rangers, lead team in the defense of Vladivostok. Killed in action on the seventeenth of December 2016. Granted a state funeral and full posthumous honors. Survived by their son Yuri, fifteen years of age, now receiving the burial flag from Marshal Lilia Baranovskaya._

_The TV in the lab is ancient, the signal poor, so Otabek watches the proceedings in bits and pieces. There’s only one point at which the broadcast comes clear—when the boy with the bone-white hands steps up to take the flag, the boy with the eyes that burn as he turns them straight on to the camera.)_

It’s snowing inside his head, too, long before he realizes it shouldn’t be. Otabek barely hears the alarms go off, can’t even see how his pulse and brain activity are spiking on the display in front of him. He has two eyes and a brain and this morning they are all traitors, refusing to focus, giving him only the snow and that intense gaze like bottle-green fire, no tears.

“We’re losing the left hemisphere!” Yakov bangs at one of the monitors with a closed fist—as if what’s happening is a mere error in the system, a glitch, not real.

“Beka!” Phichit’s voice, high with panic and fracturing on his name, is the last clear thing he hears, and that only just barely. Phichit is too far away from him now, too hard to return to, too easy to lose. “Beka, come back!”

_(Otabek has those eyes in front of him here, now—Yuri is looking at him, shaking from head to toe with pain and struggling to focus. Those are the eyes he remembers. Those eyes know who he is, and yet—)_

 

Little by little Yuri wakes up, comes back to himself, but the pain doesn’t stop. His mouth is dry, his vision blurring in and out, white-edged. Every cell in his body throbbing like it’s having a migraine.

In the control tower below, the techs are scrambling, bustling back and forth and calling out to one another. The Marshal paces the floor, flitting from monitor to monitor in a desperate attempt to make sense of what she’s looking at, decode what’s playing out in front of her when just seeing it with her eyes doesn’t appear to be enough. Yuri’s ears are more shot than anything else, because he soon realizes he can barely hear them. The sounds come to him from too far away; the quiet in Otabek’s head has invaded his own, reaching deep.

“Right hemisphere stabilizing. Left hemisphere is way out.” Phichit’s fingers are moving faster than his mouth, maybe faster than his brain—flying across the keyboard in front of him, initiating the sequence of emergency protocols that will disable Astra Nova’s weaponry, power her down while they wait for her pilots to come back. “Otabek’s chasing the rabbit.”

 _Otabek’s chasing the rabbit._ Yuri tells himself his hearing is all wrong. _Otabek’s chasing the rabbit._ Not Otabek, whose mind is so silent, so steady. Steady as the shore the ocean breaks against. Otabek would never—

“Can we cut the uplink?” Lilia asks, even though everyone in the room already knows the answer.

“Negative, ma’am; the connection’s too strong. We’re looking at severe neurotrauma if we sever the bridge abruptly now.”

He’s half-in, half-out of the world. Otabek’s memories are going haywire in his head, the images devouring each other. Otabek is eighteen and following the state funeral for Astra Nova’s pilots on a rickety television set in a lab in St. Petersburg. Otabek is twelve and has his nose pressed against the window of a low-flying plane, watching the sea open out beneath him for the first time, breathless at the stretch of it from horizon to horizon. Otabek is seven and covered in blue paint splotches from painting the wall of his house in Almaty, his sister on one side of him and his father on the other. His mother calls him onto the porch, gestures at him to put aside his roller brush and drink a glass of water: _One day, Beka, one day we’ll take you to the ocean._

In the here and now Otabek is twenty-two and caught in the net of a dream he may not wake up from.

“Is he really in so deep?”

“It’s the post-repression surge, Marshal. You could say that interfacing with the Jaeger has opened a kind of emotional floodgate. If he doesn’t come out of it on his own he may not regain consciousness.”

Yuri tells himself that’s not possible. _That’s not possible._ He’s still telling himself that when the Marshal steps up to the central microphone and calls for him, so engrossed in the words he’s repeating through the fog between his ears that he almost misses it.

“Yuri Plisetsky, status? Reply if able.”

It’s a struggle—he can barely hear her, can barely hear himself, Otabek’s silence is everywhere—but Yuri forces his own name out in answer. “Yuri Plisetsky speaking, ma’am. Stable.”

“Your partner is lost in the Drift. You need to follow him in. Stay with him. Convince him that none of what he sees is real or we _will_ lose him in there.” Even she is not so made of steel as she wants everyone to believe, Lilia Baranovskaya. Yuri’s known her all his life; he can tell when she has red in her eyes, tremors in her wiry frame. But her voice never trembles. Her voice is always sharp enough to cut, always sure. “Go now. This is a direct order.”

He knew, of course, what she’d been about to say. But he looks at Otabek, body limp in the harness, eyes staring dead ahead into a distance no one else can see, and he balks. Suddenly he has no strength even to try and hide. “I’m—”

There is no Self in the Drift. There’s you, your partner, and the machine, all one. All these years Yuri’s known that as little more than a concept. Now the weight of it falls across his shoulders like iron, crushing and terrible and utterly alien—Yuri Plisetsky is a Ranger, and Otabek Altin’s life and his death are his.

“Yuri.” _Yuri._ Not _Yurio._ Yuri. Between that and this bizarre gentleness he hears it can’t be Victor talking to him—but somehow it is. Yuri tells himself it’s the silence in his head, warping every sound. “You are responsible for your copilot. You’re the only one who can bring him back.”

Yuri’s head pulses; his vision goes white. Desperately, “Victor, I can’t—”

“You can,” Victor says. And again, “You can. Don’t worry. We’ll be right here waiting.”

_(“How far is Nakhodka?” Yuri asks. “When will you come back?”_

_He’s seen the kaiju on the monitor in their room—the clubbed tail and the claws like axeblades, the impossible height. He’s gotten used to waking up to the sound of sirens by now, but all his questions still remain._ When will you come back? _Yuri is twelve and this is the only way he knows how to tell his parents he doesn’t want them to die._

_They stand now outside the door to the Drivesuit Room, the threshold between where he’s allowed to follow and where they have to continue on alone. His mother stands beside him, feathering her fingertips over his hair. His father goes down on one knee, to look at him eye-to-eye._

_“You have to trust in us, Yurochka. Trust Mama and me to take care of each other. Trust Astra Nova to carry us home.” His father chucks him under the chin gently with his fist as he speaks:_ Chin up. Chin up, Yurochka, the best little soldier. _“If we know you’re waiting, we’ll always make it back.”)_

Another life has passed since then. Yuri Plisetsky is a Ranger. Yuri Plisetsky has no family left. But maybe it helps to know that someone is behind him, waiting, someone is always waiting—

And ahead of him is Otabek, Otabek and the fast-flowing stream of memories into which Yuri dives without looking back. First the newest ones bubbling to the surface—Vladivostok at night, the roar of the motorcycle engine as it throws itself uphill. That first long look at Astra Nova from the floor of the rear hangar, armor gleaming, head lost in the overhead lights. It’s tempting to linger—these are the ones he knows, after all, the ones he shares in—but Yuri pushes past. _Further back._ Kodiak Island in Alaska. The Jaeger Academy like a walled city on a hill overlooking the town. Seagulls. Celestino Cialdini and the exasperated spirals his hands always made in the air: _You have to let them in. If you don’t let them in, they won’t..._

 _...Trust you. Yeah, yeah, I know,_ Yuri thinks, and continues on. _Still not far enough._ He counts the places in his head, going backwards in time, letting Otabek’s memories lead him. The Vladivostok Shatterdome, the Academy on Kodiak. A blur of cities that whip by so fast they may as well not even be real—Anchorage, Los Angeles, Halifax, St. Petersburg. Distant Almaty with its tulip fields and its fountains and its blue-walled house, all Otabek’s memories of it faded and water-stained, like they belong to an entirely other life. He knows Almaty is always too far.

 _Maybe I don’t know anything about you after all,_ Yuri thinks. He lets the current push him forward, searching. There’s something in the middle Otabek is hiding, some missing piece where the quiet is thickest.

_How far is Nakhodka?_

Yuri pauses, thrown by the sound of his own voice. Then another, a female voice—a girl or a young woman, shuddering with urgency. _Beka, Beka, come here, look at me, listen to me—_

 _Kerim, wait! Where are you going? What about you, what about Mama and Papa, what about me? Kerim,_ where are you going?

It must be Otabek. Yuri feels his presence now, closest to him, calling him. He closes his eyes, and welcomes the silence.

 

* * *

 

Otabek’s watching the water when he sees the kaiju’s silhouette break the surface, making for the shore.

It’s a Saturday morning. His parents are working overtime on a new study at the lab; he and his sister Aigerim are at home. For the first few minutes what he sees doesn’t feel real—because it’s quiet, because no one has noticed yet. Even he is standing curiously still, watching the shape grow larger on the horizon.

When he goes into the house it’s for no reason other than to tell her that he saw something weird. Otabek is only fifteen. Aigerim is nineteen this past summer, and perhaps knows enough about the world to be able to tell him what it is.

“Kerim, there’s—”

 _Something coming out of the water._ It’s a thought that dies half-finished when he comes through the door and finds her on the phone. He hears his parents’ voices—so loud, such a commotion he can hear all the noise spilling out of the receiver even here, across the room—but nothing moves.

“Yes, Mama. Yes.” Kerim is fighting it, but she’s shaking. Her left hand on the handset like she’s about to snap it in two. Her right hand pulling the long braided coil of her hair over her shoulder, tugging and twisting. “The storm cellar. Yes, I know. All right. All right, Papa. Yes, I’ll take care of him. Don’t worry.” Her speech like Morse code—lips pale, tongue clumsy. Starting and stopping. Starting and stopping again, two, three words at a time. “Yes, Mama. I love you too. I love you. Be safe.”

As soon as she sets the phone back in its cradle, the sirens come.

And with the sirens, the chaos he’d been waiting for—running feet pounding the road outside their house, incoherent shouting building to a roar. It carries Otabek inside and slams the front door shut. It pushes Kerim toward him; they stumble toward each other across the room.

“Papa says it’s a Category Three about to make landfall. They’re evacuating the lab now. They’re coming to us.” Kerim holds him by the shoulders and looks into his face. Her eyes are too bright, too dry, and they seem to stare past him. Or through, like one of them is already gone. “We have to stay in the cellar, Beka. We have to stay in the cellar and wait for them.”

(Later the news will say that this is the first Category Three to make directly for any of the smaller port towns in the Primorsky Krai region. The kaiju home in on the biggest of the coastal cities, drawn as if by an internal radar toward places where the populations are densest. Otabek will watch the video footage of the attack over the counter of the nurses’ station at the public hospital furthest inland. He’ll learn its name, Chernobog, and think it’s no wonder, no wonder at all that he had no idea what he was seeing, that first look at the hulking shadow breaking the water’s surface.)

The storm cellar is an if-ever, a just-in-case. The last special consideration of a family that won’t leave the water’s edge, this small door built at a low angle to the ground in the furthest corner of their garden. Kerim is opening the door and hustling Otabek down the stairs, down into the dark where no kaiju can reach, when they hear the voices ring out from the house on the other side of the fence.

(Otabek knows Mr. and Mrs. Petrenko are old and have no children still in the city. Some evenings he’s watched them talk across that fence in hushed voices, the sweet-faced old couple and his mother or his father. Some days Kerim sends him to their house with freshly clipped sprigs from the herb bushes in her planter’s box.)

“Is that Mama and Papa?” It can’t be—the lab is down by the port, close to the water, too far away to return from by foot in only a matter of minutes—but Otabek is foolish enough to hope.

“Maybe,” she says, looking back over her shoulder. She won’t stop looking back, won’t stop turning away. “No. Maybe the neighbors. I should check, they might—”

Otabek catches her arm before she can take another step. “Please don’t go.”

“They might need help.”

“Then I’ll go with you.”

“Beka—”

“I’ll go with you!” Kerim’s not listening. Kerim’s not here. He shouts the words, wide-eyed and terrified at how they echo against the walls of the stairwell, half-underground.

That brings her back. She looks at him, really looks at him this time, softening.

“Beka, Beka, come here. Look at me. Listen to me.” She has half a head of height on him and stands one step above; she needs to reach down to take hold of his face, cradling his head in her hands. “You need to stay here. Don’t come out. Just a few minutes and I’ll come back for you.” A few minutes is too long. Otabek shakes his head, keeps shaking it until her grip firms up, holds him still until he can’t look anywhere but into her eyes. “Wait for me to come back. But you have to stay here, Beka. You have to stay safe. You have to stay safe. Promise me.”

No. He won’t promise. Promises mean she’s going to leave. _Where are you going?_ _What about you, what about Mama and Papa, what about_ me? _Where are you going?_ But he lets himself down; he swallows it all. “I promise.”

Kerim carries his promise away with her in a closed fist. She edges him down the last few steps into the cellar and closes the door, and he can do nothing but sit down on the floor—back to the wall, arms looped over his knees. In the absence of any light to see by, he listens.

Everything comes to him muffled, the way sound travels slowly underwater. The crashing, the screams. Sleek silvery fighter planes shrieking their advance, the more guttural roar of helicopter rotor blades. Above all these things, the kaiju’s feet striking the earth, thudding over the ground, shaking it to the core.

(Later Otabek will know exactly what all these sounds mean—the airforce and the Jaeger Astra Nova driving Chernobog backward out of the city, back toward the water where there’s nothing left to destroy. Later this isolation tactic will become commonplace in the engagement of kaiju that make landfall.)

Otabek stops listening. He covers his ears and counts the seconds while the earth itself roars and shakes above him. Kerim doesn’t come back.

An eternity drips by. Kerim doesn’t come back. Otabek’s long stopped counting seconds by the time everything finally goes quiet and it feels, like earlier, barely real. He doesn’t know if he’s gone deaf or if it’s really over.

(Later the doctors will tell him that he was in shock throughout most of the aftermath, and that with proper care he had a high chance of making a full recovery. But Otabek experiences everything as shrouded in that eerie silence that first wrapped itself around his head from the moment he first saw the kaiju’s shadow, and did not dissipate. Isn’t dissipating.)

Otabek needs to know what is left of the world above. But to know things, he needs to come out from underground. He needs to break a promise.

There’s dust in his hair, cold sweat on the back of his neck; his knees knock together as he takes first one step, then another, back up the stairs. Back the way he came.

Otabek pushes the cellar door open, and goes out into the light.

 

When the first flakes touch his hair and cling there Yuri thinks it’s snowing. It takes a moment to realize it’s the dust, rising from the debris, suspended in the air.

He comes to himself in the garden. That’s where he takes his first steps deep into Otabek’s memories. Here in the ashes Yuri walks to see the quiet that has devoured everything; he takes in the uprooted trees, the ruined house, the completely trampled residential district opening out beyond the fence. The whole street is asleep—except he knows that the truth is it’s dead, all dead—except for one lone surveillance helicopter that streaks across the sky above his head. The dust is already settling in sheets over the rubble.

Yuri hears the banging on the cellar door, is watching when it opens and regurgitates Otabek from out of the ground. Otabek at fifteen is smaller, softer than Yuri remembers. In the midst of all this destruction he looks almost delicate, like the wind could blow by and carry him away.

Yuri knows he should shake him awake, should talk him down. But in the ruins of Otabek’s city there is no sound; all Yuri can do is follow him as he wanders out of the yard and down the street, going nowhere, just moving in the vague direction of the water. It’s only when he crests the slope at the end of the road and sees the port and the ocean beyond that Otabek wakes up the smallest bit, starts to lengthen his strides, pick up enough speed to break into a run.

Maybe there. Maybe someone is there. Otabek runs, and Yuri follows him. Yuri steps where he steps, all the way to Nakhodka Port, to the line where the road ends and the beach begins. Stretched out in front of them is the dead kaiju, half sunk into the sand, half in the water. The Jaeger standing over it. That’s where Yuri finds his voice.

“It’s just a memory,” Yuri tells him. “You lived through this, Otabek. You have to wake up.”

He’s an idiot for not recognizing the Jaeger the moment his eyes fall on it, but the sun is setting behind it and touching the silver all over with red, and his eyes don’t quite focus, and then _oh shit, oh shit_ , it’s wrong how all the pieces of this story fall together so late, how stupid that he had to walk through Otabek’s head and come out so deep in the past. Then Astra Nova is bending with the grace that only she has in her bones—going down on one knee, as low as she can. At the crown of her head Yuri sees the Conn-Pod open, one of her pilots climb out and make their way down, scaling shoulder and arm and hand until the soles of their boots touch the ground.

Yuri’s mother is a tiny woman, slight, incongruous in her black armor, but she walks like she’s ten feet tall. The way Otabek looks at her you’d think she was a giant; Yuri feels his gut twist at the realization that he still remembers how that feels, that sense of always having to look up.

“Otabek!” Yuri knows he’s about to go to pieces. He can’t afford this, can’t can’t _can’t_ start believing that any of this is real, he’s their only way back and if he loses it here they’ll both be lost.

Nadia Plisetskaya draws to a halt in front of Otabek with a smile and her helmet tucked under one arm—loose-limbed and breezy, as if the battle and the dead kaiju are things that have happened to someone else. “Hey, what’s your name?”

Yuri knows Otabek can barely hear her. Yuri feels what he feels, the fear and the turbulence. Yuri knows that when he swallows the scream building in the pit of his throat and whispers “Beka” it’s because it’s the name everyone who’s ever loved him has used.

“Beka,” she says, to let him know that she’s heard him. “Can you breathe?”

He can’t answer yes or no, can’t even move to nod or shake his head. But she understands; it’s easy to tell. She sees everything.

“It’s safe now, I promise.” In the distance they see a second helmeted figure emerge from the Jaeger’s head, begin to climb down and set off across the sand toward them. “My partner and I took it down, see?”

“The sea’s breathing, Beka,” she tells him. It’s one way of saying they’re all alive together here. “Breathe with me, okay? Breathe with the waves. I’ll count.”

Yuri remembers this. It’s what you do when you feel afraid. Breathe in, count to four. Hold and count to seven. Breathe out, count to four. Do it again, as many times as you need. Keep chasing that next breath. Yuri hears his mother in his head, talking his smaller self through, guiding him out of the fear. _Yurochka, breathe with me._

Yuri feels the pulse of Otabek’s thoughts, rushing together, barely words: _My sister, my mother, my father, my house._ Undercutting all of it is the temptation, the horror of it, the shadow of a desire to stay—Otabek’s memories are all pain, bright red and terrible to behold, but in them his parents are still alive.

And then Sasha is there, shedding his helmet, so tall the sun shines behind his head, fiery streaks in his fair hair. Then he’s kneeling in the sand and facing Otabek eye to eye, and Yuri remembers this too, how good his father’s always been at making people forget to be afraid of him, making himself small.

“You were very brave today,” he says. “Don’t worry, we’re with you now.”

That’s a familiar line. _You were very brave today._ Yuri remembers being so little and so sure that everything he did was brave somehow; that’s how often he remembers hearing it, tacked onto the end of every seemingly insignificant thing. _Do you know what you did, Yurochka? You finished your vegetables. You shook the Marshal’s hand. You sat still through the whole briefing._

Yuri Plisetsky, grown up, is not half so brave as his father imagines. But Yuri Plisetsky is a Ranger, and Otabek Altin is his copilot.

The only way to snap yourself out of chasing the rabbit is to tell yourself, again and again until you believe, that none of what you see is real. This isn’t real. Yuri knows that in his own memories of this day, he is twelve and ensconced in the pilots’ quarters at the Shatterdome—waiting for some sign that the battle is over, waiting for his parents to come home. He knows that when night falls and the helicopters carry Astra Nova back to her place of rest he’ll meet his parents outside the hangar door, and they’ll bend to embrace him so tightly he feels all his bones squeeze together. They won’t tell him anything about what they saw—the city, the monster, the strange, sad boy who’d almost forgotten how to breathe.

In what he recognizes is the here and now Yuri only has Otabek. Otabek, and all that waits for them on the other side of this.

Yuri knows he doesn’t belong here. Yuri’s parents as they exist in Otabek’s memories can’t see him. They can’t hear him either, so he doesn’t speak to them, not even to stay goodbye (again, he thinks, goodbye _again_ ). Instead he steps in front of them, grabs Otabek by the shoulders and shakes as hard as he can, willing him with every cell in his body to _Wake up. Wake_ up.

“I’m here, Beka!”

  
Otabek is fifteen and alone in a flattened city. Later the search-and-rescue teams will come for him, and he’ll be handed off to doctors and then to his parents’ colleagues and then to distant relatives, and he’ll move the whole world over trying to heal, though the truth is that mostly means trying to forget.

Later he imagines he’ll understand all of this, later all the pieces will fit as they should, except later is now. There was life after Nakhodka; somehow he’d forgotten this even as it was happening. Nakhodka is the story that binds all the others, but Nakhodka is not the place where everything ends, as he’d once imagined, walking the ruins.

Otabek is trying now to make sense of all the stories. It’s true that one is the story of the battle of Nakhodka, which is also the story of how Astra Nova came to him. That’s the ending. Or is it the beginning, because he didn’t die that day?

One is the story of how he earned his armor, which is also the story of how he came to Astra Nova, in silence, all empty and without hope. But that is neither beginning nor ending; it’s now, still being written.

But in between these two stories is another—the longest one, because the road that leads out of destruction and ends at the choice to fight passes through so many homes and so many failures. It took him to the Jaeger Academy, and at last to the Shatterdome at Vladivostok. Here on the edge of all things he found Yuri Plisetsky grown into a soldier, Yuri Plisetsky found him still fighting to live, they each found the other standing guard, shoulder to shoulder with those others who would place themselves between the monsters and the rest of humanity.

This is the story that matters most, because it’s the one where he remembers how to be a person—here, now, in the head of the machine.

Here, now—Otabek is twenty-two and Yuri Plisetsky is refusing to let him go.

_“I’m here!”_

Otabek hears; hearing, he reaches for Yuri. He wants to be near—for real this time. He wants to come back.

 

* * *

 

They emerge to silence, like the entire base has frozen all this time they’ve been gone, suspended and holding its breath. Yuri disconnects them both, tears the harness from his back and the helmet from his head so he can circle around to catch Otabek as he goes limp and they both go down onto the floor.

Downstairs Mission Control is coming out of its trance, but to Yuri it’s all snatches of sound, indistinct voices. The Marshal saying—something, Yakov answering. Phichit on the emergency intercom—“Medical, medical—requesting—I repeat—” It feels like a sick joke that the first voice he hears with any clarity is the AI, every word clipped and cold and precise:

**Neural bridge exercise invalid.**

(“Medical, requesting—emergency services—”)

**Drift sequence terminated. Would you like to try again?**

Otabek is seizing, body shaking fiercely in Yuri’s lap as Yuri takes his helmet off to let him breathe, eyes staring and unfocused no matter how much Yuri shakes him by the shoulders.

“Come back, Beka.” Otabek’s tremors are in his own body now. Yuri wants him to wake up, wants it like nothing he knows how to tell. The desperation is all the more frightening because it’s familiar, part of his head still ringing with memories of the day Astra Nova fell. He had wanted it then too, so badly; the return, the moving-toward. “Come back, come back.”

His eyes are stinging, his face wet. What happens when the trembling stops is that Otabek slips away before Yuri can get a full grip on what’s happening; his eyes roll back and snap shut and then he’s asleep, breathing slow. It’s lethargy, exhaustion, the neurotrauma pulling him down. Giving him that little bit of peace.

Yuri looks down at his face and it hits him, strangely—he’s never seen Otabek sleep before. He goes to bed after Yuri and rises before him, every day, so stupidly committed to those pre-dawn runs. Always awake, always moving, always on his feet. He decides that he doesn’t know what he’ll do, if Otabek doesn’t get up again.

When the door to the Conn-Pod opens and the techs and the medical team pour in Yuri’s first instinct is to shield Otabek, from their peering eyes and the questions that he knows are already coming together on their tongues. He can’t figure out any way to do that but to drag him closer and lock his arms, so that Otabek’s body is curled against his chest and Yuri can feel the physical motion of his breath rising and falling, rising and falling.

“Stay away from me! Stay the hell away from me!” He doesn’t realize his own hysteria, doesn’t hear himself screaming, but the ragged noises that reverberate all around the Conn-Pod and shudder all the way down the still-open communication line to the control tower can’t possibly be anything else. His hands are white-knuckle clenching like they hold the switch for some hidden explosive—for the terror, for the grief that wants to get out any way that it can. “Don’t you touch him! Don’t you touch him!”

Footsteps on the gangway outside—quick and urgent, but lighter over the floor than the others. Feathery, dancing. You can search the whole base from top to bottom and you’ll find only one person who walks like that. Yuri knows the exact moment Yuuri Katsuki arrives in the Conn-Pod from the hush that descends, the way the crowd parts, shuffling awkwardly in and out of his peripheral vision, but he doesn’t lift his head. All he wants to do is hold Otabek until he wakes up.

“Yuri.”

Yuri’s arms won’t unbend; his whole body is frozen from head to toe and refuses to move. It’s like being fifteen years old again, being so far outside of himself he’s sure he’ll lose the way back. “No.”

“Yuri.” Yuuri is gentle. Yuuri is always gentle. Yuuri’s gentleness makes him so angry; there’s no place for it in a world that’s been at war for as long as he can remember, no way it can rescue anyone or keep them alive. “It’s all right now.”

No one knows what he saw; Yuri tells himself he’ll die before he tells them. “No.”

“It is,” Yuuri says, going down on one knee beside him. Yuri doesn’t look at him, won’t. “It is. But now you have to let him go. The medical team’s here; they’ll take care of him.”

He’s got no spit left to shout again, but he keeps fighting—squeezes his eyes shut and shakes his head, over and over. Yuri Plisetsky is a Ranger, and a Ranger needs to stay with his copilot. He clutches Otabek to his chest like he’s the only sure thing ever to exist and it makes him so angry, so angry to be so adrift, he imagines he might die from it.

Yuuri’s hand touches his hair, patting it down, smoothing the knotty, sweat-streaked cap of it. Yuri knows he should swat it away—that he would have, at any other time—but instead he leans, following the movement. “It’s okay. You’re safe now.”

What does _safe_ mean? Is it safety that takes whatever little fight is left right out of him, until at last his arms relax and relinquish their death grip on Otabek? He’s only half-aware of it when the medics draw near and lift Otabek out of his lap and onto a stretcher to carry him off to the medical bay; he feels it most as an absence of warmth, the empty Conn-Pod suddenly frigid, and in that absence he pulls his knees up and in, hugging himself tightly enough to break his own bones.

Yuuri doesn’t leave him, now that everyone else is gone. He sits on the floor next to Yuri, as close as he dares, as close as he’s ever been—waits there without speaking as Yuri buries his head in his knees and sobs. Until he’s spent all the breath in his body and gone quiet, exhausted.

“Don’t be scared,” he says. “He’ll wake up soon.”

 _When? How soon?_ Yuri balks. He’s never been big on anyone making him promises, most especially promises there’s no way they’re in any position to keep. And he knows his eyes are red, his voice croaking and ugly on the question.  “How do you know?”

Yuuri’s quiet a little while—not exactly a hesitation. Just turning the thought over. “I just know he will. You saved him.”

Bullshit. _I did nothing,_ Yuri wants to say, but he can’t.

 _You saved him,_ Yuuri said. He doesn’t know how to argue with that, doesn’t know how to speak his defiance. Maybe he’s just too tired—he’s seen so much, heard so much, he doesn’t have enough of the machine in him as he’d once believed. But he remembers Otabek’s face, eyes closed and every tense line on it relaxed into a smooth surface for once, Yuri’s tears from the last five years on his cheeks, and then he can do nothing but bend, having stood witness to all these things.

You don’t save people. All you can do is fight and hope they don’t die while the dust clears. Machines fight because that’s what they’re built to do, and that’s what Yuri was, that was all he had. Until this new thing he found inside Otabek’s head, this fragile human understanding, until Otabek.

Something to stay alive for. Something to return to—that one tiny, stupid, precious thing.

He’ll wake up soon. Maybe Yuuri is right. Maybe he’s already on his way back.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Fans of the original film will recognize the spiritual debts this chapter owes the iconic Mako Mori scene--strangely enough that was the highlight of the experience for me, more than anything else, because it drove the emphasis of compassion so far home to me and I just. I loved it so much, ugh.
> 
> Full disclosure: the idea for this chapter was the seed that eventually took root in my brain and became a monster, so this particular part has been a long time coming, and to have finally reached it is pretty overwhelming, to say the least.
> 
> Onward! The next chapter will be the last of the main story. <3


	5. a soft place to fall

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Title from Aurora's "Runaway," which is in many ways this fic's over-arching theme song.

Yuri saw a guy—a tall swaggering American, named Jacob or Jude or something—chase the rabbit once, at the Academy. He made it all the way to number two at the top of the rotation after winning a few solo simulations, nice clean by-the-book kills, and afterwards he’d come right back out into the real world and go out on the town with the other boys, drinking and shouting and chasing women until the next drop.

Yuri was watching the day he broke, fell so far out of alignment he was out of commission for a week after Celestino shut the sim down, just sleeping the days away on life support in the medical wing. He sectioned out as soon as he woke up. A psychological casualty: suddenly he couldn’t stop thinking about home.

Why? Why Jacob, why not anybody else? Why not Yuri? The other guys in the barracks wouldn’t shut up about it, but Yuri had a theory he never told them. It was because he was always talking—about where he’d come from, about a family he’d left behind, how he imagined the war would end, what he’d do after. Who could help it? Who could blame him? That was what normal people did. Normal people had memories they looked back on from time to time, had it in them to imagine a future and a hope.

To chase the rabbit was to get lost in the past. If you wanted to be a Ranger, maybe you couldn’t live anywhere but in the now. Maybe you couldn’t be a normal person. How else could you become the machine, fire up the cannon and empty the burst, _kaiju signature no longer detected, threat eliminated, humanity stands?_ So Yuri locked his past and his future up in a quiet corner of his mind and let the fighting take him over, and threw out everyone who tried to get into his head. They hated him for it, but at least he didn’t break. They were all hoping he would—Yuri Plisetsky, tragic orphaned son of heroes, stick up his ass the size of a Jaeger’s broadsword—but he never did.

Too many people broke before graduation. They gave up the fight and never looked back.

It’s full dark when Yuri wakes up, at the end of the day he’ll remember as the day Otabek chased the rabbit, and he can’t tell where he is. It’s absurd that his first thought is that he’s in the barracks again, after lights-out, listening to the whispers wafting back and forth between the bunks.

Then it comes back. The Conn-Pod, Yuuri helping him rise from the floor on a pair of broken knees—how they’d kept shaking, knocking together. How he’d insisted that they follow to the infirmary all through Yuuri’s soft demurrals that Yuri should lie down, he could barely walk, he needed rest. The chair by Otabek’s bed in the medical wing with its cushions worn down to practically nothing, the heart monitor blipping by his bed—

The rest is vague. Yuri remembers the nurses coming in and out, all ghostly and hovering, barely alive to him for all their quips and their laughter _(Go rest, Yuri, he’s not going anywhere. Look at you, Yuri—don’t make us check you in!)._ He’d watched the sun outside the window deepen to a warm yellow in the late afternoon, falling through the glass in wide bars, across the bed and onto the floor. At around four his grandfather had come to get him, like Yuri was some kid who’d just been let out of school, had steered him by the elbow down the hall to what used to be their quarters.

“You need to go back,” he’d said, partway through being nagged into bed, fighting the fog that had begun to creep into his head the moment it touched the pillow. “Dinner preps.”

“Shh, go to sleep,” his grandfather had told him, as if to say that was that, no arguments, and he wasn’t going to move from where he stood until Yuri had reached an acceptable degree of unconscious.

He must have slept, because nothing comes after when he tries to remember. Yuri uncurls himself, sprawls supine across the mattress and counts what cracks in the paint above his head he can still make out in the darkened room. It’s strange now to sleep with the ceiling so far from his face, but he decides he wouldn’t have wanted to return to his room anyway. It would have been too quiet, too high up, the silence of the pilots’ wing like thrice-reinforced steel. And he would have found Otabek’s bed just as he’d left it that morning—the sheets turned down and tucked into the mattress, pillows leaning against the wall.

That’s how his grandfather finds him when he comes through the door and clicks the overhead light on. The first beam comes down straight into Yuri’s eyes, and he throws a protective arm over his face—“Ow, Deda!”—but it does work, he’s already sitting up. Scowling, albeit halfheartedly, into the fabric of his sleeve at the sound of Nikolai chuckling, puttering into the room and making himself right at home.

Yuri doesn’t let himself think—not too often, and never for too long—about how old his grandfather is. That would mean thinking about how he should never have come here. There had been a house in Moscow, full of photographs, where Yuri had spent his summers learning the story of each one. _Here are your father and mother on their wedding day. This is the day they left to fly with the Air Force. This is you on the day you were born._ And Nikolai Plisetsky had abandoned it all, to be with a boy who had nothing left.

He’s thinking so hard it jolts him when Nikolai comes up and drops a bag on the bedside table. Paper bags always mean pirozhki, and when there’s pirozhki, things can’t possibly be all bad. It’s a stupid thing to believe, but he’s believed it all his life; against all odds he finds part of him believes it still.

“Eat up,” Nikolai says. “You missed dinner.”

The bag is still warm. The brown paper rustles faintly as Yuri dips his hand into it. “You made too much again.”

“It’ll keep for a few days in the refrigerator. You can share them with Otabek when he wakes up.”

Otabek. The sound of his name drops a stone right into Yuri’s stomach, closes his throat up tight until swallowing seems impossible. But he takes the first bite, then the second, gingerly so as not to burn himself. Nikolai doesn’t watch him, but instead putters around the room, rearranging the books on the desk and straightening the picture frames. He doesn’t seem to notice the tiny bites Yuri is taking, when under normal circumstances he’d be stuffing his face.

Yuri’s halfway through the first bun when Nikolai sits beside him, hairbrush in hand. “Your hair’s a mess, Yurochka.”

Nikolai must know Yuri tosses and turns in his sleep, has done so all his life since he was a toddler who had to sleep wedged between his parents to keep from rolling onto the floor in the middle of the night. He knows his grandson wakes every morning with haystack-hair, and how cruel to it Yuri can be, clawing and tugging and scraping with the comb until the locks lie flat against his head. Over the years Yuri’s watched him count the combs, sigh, taken extra care to say nothing about all the broken teeth.

“I just woke up,” Yuri protests. He looks down at his feet, surprised and more than a bit peeved that his eyes are suddenly wet, even if his grandfather’s touch feels like nothing.

Nikolai has the second-lightest hands of anyone he knows. Yuri sighs. He bows his head and acquiesces—lets himself be cared for, if only here, now.

 

* * *

 

Otabek wakes up to the sun, warm fingers on his face and forehead, and the sound of the waves. Blinking, he raises himself on one elbow, turns to peer out at the world through the window. It’s morning on the other side of the glass—a temperate midsummer morning, whispering up from the water with all the quiet sweetnesses it’s too easy to forget.

Cloth rustles beside him. Otabek turns, sees Phichit sleeping in the armchair pulled up next to his bed, head bobbing gently forward and back as he breathes. At rest like this it’s easy to see where he’s let himself go, the chinks and cracks that no one sees when he’s awake. There’s no spirit now, no bubbling exuberance—just an unsightly pallor in his face and a spiderweb of wrinkles down the front of an unwashed lab coat. His hair’s a mess too, all mussed up at the crown.

Almost as though he knows he’s being watched, Phichit stirs. He yawns, paws at his eyes with his coat sleeve before he turns them toward Otabek, focusing. “Hey, you’re alive.”

“So are you.” Otabek finds he doesn’t much like the shadows he sees under those eyes; he already knows no one in J-Tech works harder than Phichit, but he must be more than tapped if he’s letting it show on his face like this. How much time has passed since the test run? “You need to get more sleep, Boss.”

“Maybe I would if a certain problematic duo would let me.” Phichit puts a subtle crack of authority on the end of the reprimand, and Otabek has the good sense to grimace in what he thinks is a contrite fashion. In the end it’s Phichit who buckles first, grinning, exasperated—at himself or at Otabek, maybe even both. “Yuri’s been tearing the whole medical wing down because of you, you know.”

Otabek looks down at his hands, closes them slowly in the folds of the blanket. “Yuri was here?”

“Only all of yesterday after you passed out. Kid wouldn’t leave this chair. The nurses had to throw him out—almost literally, mind you.” Phichit softens up when he doesn’t answer right away, turns down the brightness on the grin. “I’m sorry if you’re disappointed your good morning kiss has to come from me instead.”

He knows what Phichit’s doing. Trying to put him at ease, make him laugh. He wants to laugh, but it’s trapped inside, caught somewhere in the hollow of his chest. He knows the fear from this morning still has its claws in him. “What’s going to happen now?”

There are too many ways he means it. There’s no way the Jaeger Program can afford to continue trying to rehabilitate a pilot with such extensive unresolved trauma; he’s likely to be reassigned, if not dismissed entirely. To say nothing of the possible state of his brain, to say nothing of Yuri—

(Yuri. The first question in Otabek’s head is _Are they going to ground Yuri too?_ The second, absurdly, is _Does Yuri hate me?_ But he knows full well Phichit’s in no position to answer the first and would only be able to offer a hypothesis for the second, and any way you slice it that’s too awkward a conversation to have with Phichit at this point or possibly ever, so he shuts up about it.)

“Well, against all odds, your brain scans came out clean. No signs of physical damage, and your vitals have been stable for the past twelve hours or so. You’ll probably be cleared for discharge within the day, but...” He trails off, looks down at his lap, twiddles his fingers. Breathes in deep, and sighs. “That’s some pretty severe trauma you’ve been keeping a lid on, Beka.”

He doesn’t want to do it—there’s no point in doing it—but without even stopping to think about it Otabek tenses. Walls up. “Do you—”

“No, no!” Phichit’s hands fly up, fingers spread, palms turned out conciliatorily toward Otabek. “Of course not. Yuri wouldn’t tell. Swore up and down he wouldn’t say a word until you were ready to talk about it.”

(Did he, really?)

Phichit again, treading light. “You’re going to have to soon, though, I think.”

“I know. I just didn’t think I’d need to anymore.” It’s not an excuse, not yet the apology he knows he owes, but it’s the only way he knows how to explain it.

“Yeah, I get it. I—I can guess what was going on in your head, too, I suppose.”

It hadn’t felt like there was any choice. There hadn’t been time to learn how to talk to people about what had happened, about who he had been. He’d been afraid—so afraid—that finding words for all those things would kill him, and he’d promised Kerim he would live. She had said he needed to live. For Otabek there had been no way forward but to fold up that promise and keep it close to his heart, and endure everything else.

(There hadn’t been time, back then, to draw up parameters. To shed a light on what exactly it was that she had wished for him—to answer the question of what being alive meant.)

“Boss, how can I—”

Phichit stops him again. “Hey, no, don’t. Don’t tell me how sorry you are. You don’t owe me a thing.” He bites his lip, stares hard at Otabek’s hands still fisted in the bedcovers, blinking furiously. Sand in his eyes, making them sting and well up. “Just. Just get better, okay? No more keeping quiet.”

There are too many things he wants to tell Phichit. He wants to say that maybe he understands a bit better now. That he’s learned a couple of things about people, about being alive. About what—and where—home is. About being in a room full of people and feeling all alone until someone sees you, talks to you, offers you a place of your own.

He knows, now, how dangerous it is to let things go without saying, but this once, just this once—

Phichit smiles at him, and Otabek feels his hands relax. “And you could do one other thing for me.”

“Anything.”

“When you have time,” Phichit tells him, “come by the lab and let Mila throw a few punches at that thick head of yours. She’s been ready to break something since yesterday.”

 

* * *

 

When Yuri gets the news from his grandfather at midmorning—“Your partner’s awake and ready to be discharged”—his first thought is, pathetically, _I’m not ready—_

He wants to shout. He wants to run. Part of him wants to cry, and the rest of him wants to kill that part. But over and above all these things and threatening at every turn to overwhelm him is this terror, this heavy all-abiding confusion—for the past twenty-four hours he’s done nothing but want Otabek to wake up, wanted it more than he knew you could want _anything,_ but now that he has it’s all questions—what to say to him, what to do—

But Yuri’s body has other ideas. Yuri’s feet are already running out of the kitchen, are shuffling in place even as the elevator takes him up to the medical bay. Yuri’s hands are out in front of him the minute he reaches the infirmary, are throwing open the door with too much force, are bracing his weight against the door frame as he tries to breathe.

On the other side of the door Otabek is speaking quietly with the head physician, signing his name across the bottom of a form. He doesn’t startle at the interruption, though the doctor does; when he lifts his head and looks at Yuri it’s as if he’s been waiting for him, only he’s as strapped for words as Yuri is. He only says two to the doctor—“Thank you”—before he turns and steps out of the infirmary, through the door Yuri nearly yanked off its hinges a minute ago, rolling it closed behind him.

Out in the hallway they face each other, and Otabek’s face is such a blank slate Yuri finds he can’t read it at all, nothing there for him but that implacable wordlessness that flies in the face of anything Yuri might think to say. It’s just like the day they met but also nothing like—the silence its own big question, a conversation that feels too much like a fight.

How do you even ask someone to talk about things they’ve never talked about? All the steps forward they’ve taken together seem like they’ve fallen away, and all that’s left is the fear—maybe he’d been imagining it, to think they understood each other any better than this.

“Do you want to come upstairs?”

Yuri almost lets his fear outrun him—almost says no, I’m tired of you dragging me around, if you’ve got something to say to me we’re going to hash it out right here, right now. But even he knows that’s not all true; Otabek never makes him go anywhere, always asks and never compels, waits for him to answer. Yuri never has any idea why he does these things—has only just figured out how little he understands anything Otabek’s ever done or said—but when he remembers them all the fight goes out of him.

“This is so stupid.”

“So that’s a no, then?”

“No, it’s not, you ass,” Yuri says and stalks off down the hall. It’s only later that he realizes he has no idea where Otabek wants to go, slows down, shoves his hands into his pockets and lets his partner take the lead—around the corner, up the stairs at the end of the next hall, up and up.

Yuri’s never been one to go up onto the roof of the base, not in all his years here; by contrast Otabek has a way about him that suggests he comes here often. There’s a kind of certitude to the way he turns the doorknob and steps out into the wind, walking into it without hesitation while Yuri puts his arm up to shield his face from the first chill blast. The wind does what it wants up here, brushing down the slope of his neck and ruffling his hair. When he breathes in, he can taste the salt.

Otabek leads him to the edge and Yuri remembers the lookout point at the top of Eagle’s Nest Hill—the city below them, small and full of life, wide awake so late into the night. They stand now by the rails, side by side without speaking, and when they look outward all they see is water.

“When I was a kid, I wanted so much to live near the sea,” Otabek says, out of nowhere. Leaning on the rail again, looking out at the water—looking away from Yuri, like Yuri isn’t even there. “Kazakhstan is landlocked, and Almaty, the city where I was born, is an inland city on the far east border, but my parents had lived abroad studying biological oceanography, so they taught me all about it. Growing up my head was full of stuff about sea creatures. Immortal jellyfish. What happens when a starfish loses its arm. Aquatic microorganisms that can survive in space.”

 _Nerd,_ Yuri thinks. It makes sense now, the view from the plane window he saw in the Drift. The blue house.

“They promised us the ocean one day, my sister and me. I loved the thought of it—looking out at it every day, all the endless water, like freedom.” There’s a pause—Otabek’s counting, adding up the years. “I think it was in ‘08 that they got big research positions in the lab in Nakhodka; we moved in the summer, that same year. I was... maybe nine years old, about to turn ten.”

Yuri knows his history. The first kaiju attack would have come two years later—San Francisco in 2010. “And you didn’t move back after the Breach opened up?”

“My parents got tapped to study kaiju blue containment. They would have sent us back without them, but we wouldn’t go.”

It’s kind of scary, the way he says this—soft and toneless, the way you remark about the weather or read a grocery list aloud, about things that are self-evident. Yuri knows now that the truth is something else.

“Your family was crazy.” He bristles when Otabek lifts an eyebrow at him. He knows it’s not as if his family was much better—Otabek knows all there is to know about his life now, that he’s a child of war who’s never even lived in a house. “Shut up, I know I’m one to talk.”

“I moved foster homes a lot after the attack. Distant relatives would take me in, my parents’ colleagues.” Otabek’s face is turned away again, so Yuri watches his hands instead. Coming together, fingers laced. Opening again, separating. “Wherever I went I made it a point to watch the broadcasts, keep an eye out for Astra Nova—follow your parents’ work, as closely as I could. I hadn’t even thought about piloting then, about becoming a Ranger. It was just that they were the last thing I remembered from home.

“I was watching the day they—” Otabek takes a deep breath, stops himself. They both know that part. They both watched it happen. “And the funeral too. That’s when I saw you.”

Yuri’s own memories of that day are so sharp they still cut at him. The snow. The two coffins, dark wood and lily wreaths. How he’d wanted to cover his ears during the twenty-one-gun salute—how he had not, but instead stood at attention until all of it was over, arms rigid by his sides.

“Why didn’t you say anything to me?” Yuri doesn’t mean it to sound accusatory—or, at least, he doesn’t _think_ he does. But there’s nothing he can do when the pain creeps in, word by word, pinprick after pinprick, until the question itself is full of needles.

Otabek takes it, quietly, waits awhile before answering.

“I didn’t know how to say it.” Yuri thinks he can believe that. He _wants_ to believe it, wants to convince himself that it sounds for once like the straight-up truth. No secrets this time, nothing going in circles, nothing told slant. “I mean, listen. Hello, Yuri, I’m Otabek. You may not know me, but I know you from watching your parents’ funeral on TV. Or maybe, hello, Yuri. If it wasn’t for your parents, I wouldn’t be alive today. Or: hello, Yuri. Sometimes I worry I remember your mother’s voice better than I remember mine.” He’s out of breath by the time he finishes, like he’s spent from saying so many words at once.

Yuri can’t help but laugh, harsh and hollow. Even he hears it like glass breaking. He feels the shards in his throat. “I would probably have socked you one.”

“See.” Otabek swallows, shifts his weight tensely from one foot to the other before continuing. “I thought I’d put the past behind me. I wasn’t going to burden anyone with it, not even you.” Yuri, involuntarily, leans a bit closer, close enough to see his mouth twist. “Especially you, because you knew what it was like.”

What _what_ was like? Being without family, making your own way in the world? Having to shoulder it all in silence? Yuri remembers, too well, having to field so many questions—first on-base, later at the Academy, questions with big words like _legacy_ and _hero._ Everyone coming in too close for comfort; so close there wasn’t even a point in trying to separate out the caring from the curious from the assholes who only wanted to piggyback on a clean combat record and a famous name. _I don’t need you. Stay away from me._

 _Your parents are heroes, Yuri Plisetsky,_ they told him. More than once. Far more than just once. The only answer he ever had for them, scalpel-sharp and full of poison: _My parents are dead._

He’d been afraid in the beginning, that Otabek would be no different. He can admit this now. The strange thing is part of him still dares to hope that Otabek _is_ different—insists that it _knows_ Otabek is different, even if he still doesn’t understand _how._

“Phichit said you chose me. Why?”

“You want the truth? I don’t know. Maybe I thought we were alike. Maybe I just wanted to see what you were like for myself.” Another silence; Otabek choosing his words carefully, lining them up until they make sense. His next ones are barely a whisper, so quiet they’re almost lost to the water before Yuri can catch them. “Yuri, I wouldn’t have asked—I never wanted you to help me live.”

Yuri bites his lip. All his life he’s had little patience for abstractions. For big words—grief and hope and the rest. The way he’s always seen it is that people have a bad habit of giving life ultimatums: don’t cross this line or it will crush me, don’t take this from me because I can’t bear it. But life ignores them all; it crosses the line and what can you do but take it as your cue to despair? The day he saw Astra Nova fall, and every day thereafter for years, all those days Yuri had thought he couldn’t bear it, had wondered if one day he’d simply lie down and not get up again. But the next morning, he’d get up—and the next morning, and every morning after that. No reason for any of it but that he was a soldier, and the son of soldiers, and soldiers never drew lines. They only turned and went on.

Wanting to live, though; the drive and desire of it. Being happy that he’s alive, even just a little. That’s different. That’s a question he’s never even considered. It could well be that Otabek is the same way.

“Well, what do you want now?”

“What?”

“It’s a simple question. And you owe me answers, remember?” Yuri’s voice cracks, and there’s nothing he can do about it. He can’t look Otabek full in the face either. Suddenly it’s easier to do as Otabek does when talking is difficult—to face the water instead, to lean toward it. “What do you want now?”

When he doesn’t get an answer, once he starts to feel the silence threatening to settle all around them, Yuri snaps, “You’re thinking too hard again.”

“I’m not.”

“You are—I _know_ what you’re thinking. You’re thinking about what’s most reasonable, what’s best for everyone, what demands the least.” Yuri knows those thoughts like they’re his own. All he has to do is open his mouth and the words are there. “Right?”

A frown. “You say that like it’s wrong.”

“It’s not, but that’s not what I’m asking. I just want to know what you want.”

Otabek considers this, looks at him with a wrinkled brow. “I’m not exactly an expert at wanting things, Yuri.”

“Could have fooled me,” Yuri scoffs. “But you know what, neither am I. We’ve got to start somewhere, so. Are you going to tell me what you want or not?”

He’s been telling himself he isn’t expecting anything, but also he says _we_ before he can stop to think about it. That’s what they’ve been working on, after all, all this time—how to be a _we,_ how not to be alone. Otabek, too, must understand it this way, must know what he knows now, at the end of all this. 

“To go on,” Otabek tells him. Far below them the sea laps at the walls of the base, tender, deceptively calm. Breathing to fill in the spaces between. “To be with you.”

Does that mean, then, that Yuri can take this as truth? Maybe it’s the only truth that matters. He’s still not prepared—maybe he’ll never be prepared—for the way it feels, always startling, always new. Like the start of something good, a beginning you ache to believe in.

“Even if I almost lost you?” Yuri presses, pushing him because that’s what he does; he pushes people until they’re at breaking point. It was the only way, for the longest time, he knew how to go on. Strip down, sharpen up. Push away everything that didn’t help you fight. “Even if we can’t save each other?”

Yuri’s already seen Otabek break. But the difference is that they came back. Otabek waited for him. Now beside him Otabek spreads his hands in a gesture of surrender—or, maybe, trust.

“I don’t know that anyone can save anyone. All I know is that it’s stopped making sense, to always face things alone.”

Everything dies. Probably humanity, too, one day. When you know this, when you see proof of it every day, the question inevitably becomes: why fight? Why keep fighting, unless you want to live?

“Okay, good. Then we’re good.”

It’s the only way he knows how to accept it, say that they want the same thing. The silence that follows already hangs in the air differently—it’s lighter, looser. Not so taut or tense or barbed. When Otabek next speaks it doesn’t break so much as recede, softly, as the morning tide does.

“I remember when I saw you on TV, five years ago. Marshal Baranovskaya was handing you the Russian flag, and you were making this incredible face—all stoic, staring straight ahead, with this look in your eyes like you were about to fight the world. The whole world, just by yourself. You must have been twelve years old.”

Yuri snorts, affronted. “I was fifteen. And you’re making fun of me.”

“No, it was amazing. It gave me this idea that—I thought you were so cool.” Otabek chuckles. “But that’s since been overturned by the image of you crying on me.”

Yuri hadn’t known he was even awake. He’d been terrified—legitimately terrified, dammit—that he was dead. He chances a nanosecond glimpse to one side, huffs out a big breath and glowers when he finds Otabek smirking like an idiot. “You’re not doing a great job of making me not want to punch you, you know.”

“You’ll have to get in line. I promised Phichit some punches, then Mila, then you.”

“That’s not fair. I’m your partner; I should have priority.” The protest is on his tongue before he even really knows what he’s saying. His elbow is already jabbing at Otabek’s arm, closing the gap.

“That just means you have more chances to fight me when I’m being stupid.” Too quickly Otabek sobers, and Yuri has to swallow his disappointment; for just a minute there he had looked about to laugh. “Assuming they don’t split us up.”

Right. He’s almost let himself forget. They’re on the chopping block—have been on the chopping block, rather, for the last three months. It’s funny to realize that he can’t figure out when exactly all of this had stopped feeling so much like a test they needed to pass, when exactly they’d found—what do you call it? A rhythm of their own, a path that was theirs. Not by any means an easy path to walk, but one that looked like it led somewhere.

The days swallow each other and disappear just like that, like storms, like cities lost to the tide. The sea stretches out its arms. They’re still here, alive together. 

“Let them try,” he says.

 

* * *

 

When the runner comes to call them to the Marshal’s office, night is falling. They don’t know that they’re ready for it, exactly, but they’ve been waiting for the summons all day without saying that they are—so that when it comes, they go without a backward glance.

The Marshal’s private office is for receiving distinguished visitors and discussing matters of utmost import and confidentiality. They talk about it on the way down, how the Marshal herself sees the room as an impermanent residence at best, spends far less time there than she does at Central Command. Otabek’s never so much as set foot in the corridor that leads straight down to that single door; Yuri himself barely remembers what it looks like inside, having only been called up there twice in all his years at the Shatterdome.

(The first, of course, was the day after his parents’ memorial, to discuss his future. The second was the day he applied to the Academy, again to discuss his future. Otabek tells himself the third time must be the charm.)

Now they’ve been forced back into stasis, on standby outside, listening to what snatches of conversation drift over to them from within—muffled voices, sometimes a word, but no more. Yuuri is in there. Probably Victor too, and Yakov. What else waits for them, though, that’s anybody’s guess.

They deal with the waiting in the ways they know how, Otabek leaning on the wall, Yuri pacing in tight circles. They don’t talk anymore now that they’ve made it here, because at this point, what else is there to say? About what happened? About what might happen, what comes next?

The minutes trickle by; the voices on the other side of the door go on without stopping. Yuri’s pacing becomes too much, eventually—even for Otabek, who takes it upon himself to catch him by the shoulder and make him hold still. Yuri sighs, drops back against the wall, mimics Otabek’s slump.

It’s too funny a coincidence—practically a cosmic joke—that that’s the exact moment the door opens. Yakov sticks his head out, motions them in.

“Plisetsky and Altin, into the office.”

They enter. The Marshal’s office is high-ceilinged and carpeted and lit with warm yellow bulbs, elegant and well-kept in the way that rooms no one lives in are. Sure enough Victor is waiting for them, standing by the window with the starlit sky behind him and Yuuri by his side. For once he doesn’t smile when he sees them, only inclines his head in vague acknowledgment without saying a word. Yuuri’s eyes are on the floor and refuse to lift as he shuffles his feet, scuffling the carpet’s lush fibers back and forth, back and forth.

There are two chairs put out for them in the center of the room. From behind her desk Lilia nods at them to sit as Yakov comes to stand at attention by her side.

“Cadet Altin, I trust you’re recovered?”

“Yes, ma’am.” Otabek answers evenly, though he feels his pulse beneath his skin already speeding up. “No major damage sustained. I was lucky, I suppose.”

“You were,” Lilia agrees. She faces them in her high-backed chair, inscrutable as she always is, all crossed legs and steepled fingers. “I would have your assessment of yesterday’s events, if you don’t mind. What you can remember of them, at least.”

Before Otabek can answer Yuri sits up, hackles raised. “Do we really have to do this now?”

Lilia meets this outburst coolly, saying nothing. Off to one side of the room Victor tilts his head, regarding them with both with a keen, remote interest, and Otabek finds his hand coming to rest on Yuri’s shoulder, pulling him back to prevent him from saying anything more insubordinate.

“Yuri, it’s all right.”

“You don’t have to talk about it.” Yuri’s leaning across the arm of his chair, toward Otabek, as close as he can go. Otabek knows what he’s trying to do—Yuri wants to cover for him, shield him, give him a way out. Who knows how many times he’s had to do it, since yesterday? Phichit had said he’d been refusing to answer any questions.

“I want to,” he says, gently.

“But—”

Otabek knows it’s not right for Yuri to keep protecting him. At the same time, he understands now—there’s no need for him to face this alone.

“When my partner fell out of phase, a memory of his triggered one of mine. That was the one I latched on to, and eventually became trapped in.” Just the facts. Just an outline. Otabek knows the whole story is a much longer one than any of them have time for at the moment, and he’s got to keep his breathing sure. “It was a memory I had been purposefully working to forget for years. When suddenly I had no choice but to look at it, to move past it, I couldn’t. I didn’t know how to handle it, and I lost control.”

Yuri, interrupting again: “It’s not—”

Otabek squeezes his arm gently to quiet him and goes on, undeterred. “Yuri followed me into my headspace and brought me back out—at great personal cost, given the ways that his own traumas intersect with mine.

“Ultimately I overestimated my ability to rein in my memories during combat, mostly because my approach was mistaken. Until then I had been operating under the assumption that attempting to suppress them was the only way to ensure I’d be able to—”

“To Drift?” Victor interjects, curiously. Otabek shakes his head.

“To live, sir. It was the only way I knew how to live.” That’s the story as he best knows how to tell it. The only way it makes any sense. He lets slip a small smile before turning to face Lilia again. “That’s my understanding of things, Marshal.”

Lilia touches her cheek with one long, spindly finger. “Tell me, then,” she says. “What do you think I should do with you now?”

Over time Otabek’s learned that not all questions are questions. Some of them lock themselves down as soon as they’re said aloud, demand specific answers, albeit not in so many words. Those questions are carved in stone. He’s not certain if Lilia’s questions are that kind—she has a way of looking at him, an I-know-you-look, that seems to suggest they might be. Or maybe it’s simply that she knows what the truth is before he ever says it.

When Otabek blinks, the image of Lilia Baranovskaya and her gunmetal eyes doesn’t fade. Stormy, iron-grey eyes. He meets them square-on, already knowing that he can’t tell her anything but the truth.

“If you’re asking whether it would be wise to continue to invest in a pilot with such an unstable mental landscape, I would say the risk is somewhat high. It would make perfect sense should you decide this was a risk you were unwilling to take.”

Yuri again, chafing, unable to contain himself: “Beka—”

“If you’re asking what we want to happen—and I know this matters very little, if at all—maybe it’s worth mentioning that my partner’s expressed a wish to remain with me. With regard to this, he and I are aligned.” He knows what it’s what Yuri had been about to say, but more than likely Yuri would have said it in fewer words. More colorful words, too. “And while I know we’ve been a gamble from the start, and that yesterday’s incident might be what finally tips the scale, I also think that everything we were able to come back from—I think that matters. I think it speaks for itself.”

“Do you agree with all of this, Yuri Plisetsky?” Lilia asks, reorienting her attention away from Otabek, fixing him with her unwavering eyes.

Yuri stares back, impassive. He’s schooled the tension from his face; instead it’s in his back and shoulders, in the muscles of his arm drawn taut under Otabek’s palm. “It’s as he says. Either way we’ll—” He glances at Otabek sidelong, as if to communicate how little he likes what he’s about to say, like he’s got a foul taste in his mouth. “We’ll defer to your judgment.”

Silence. A shiver seems to run through the room, a soft murmuring with no distinctive source. Lilia gestures to Yakov and he bends, and she whispers something in his ear. Otabek’s heart has risen up into his throat, and he sees, likewise, the varnished wood armrest slick with sweat beneath Yuri’s palm.

He’s still got Yuri’s sleeve under his own hand, his fingers curled loosely following the shape of Yuri’s forearm, so Otabek places his faith in contact and in the small spaces that still allow it.

A minute passes. Yakov straightens up, and Lilia faces them again.

“You’ve probably already surmised that before you arrived we had been debating the possible consequences of disbanding you.” She makes a gesture, one hand arcing broadly through the air to indicate herself, Yakov, Victor and Yuuri by the window. “Ultimately, as you yourself have demonstrated, it’s a question of whether the risks outweigh the rewards. And you’re right that the risks are considerable—should a Ranger lose control of their Jaeger in battle, it goes without saying that they’d endanger not only themselves and their partner, but the civilian populations they’re meant to protect as well.

“However,” she continues, “we do agree that in combat against the kaiju it’s most expedient to consider all possibilities in determining a course of action, even the most extreme. Our sense is that you responded to one such extreme circumstance as decisively as anyone could have, and that the spirit with which you returned from it is indeed more than we would have expected from even our more seasoned Rangers. At the very least, it speaks well of the strength of your bond—which, as you know, is the most significant determinant of fighting ability there is.”

Otabek tenses up. Frowns, unsure that the words mean what he thinks they mean. It takes two, it always takes two—but there are different ways that can go. Either they go down together, or they ride.

“What the Marshal means is we’ll allow you to continue your training.” Yakov clears his throat. “With thorough debriefing, of course, for both of you. As many follow-ups as necessary to get you psychologically healthy and battle-ready in the shortest amount of time.”

_Battle-ready?_

“We have Phichit-kun on the case. He’s drawing up a list of possible analysts from the Psych division right now,” Yuuri adds, half-raising his hand—clearly another bright idea of his. Otabek can sense his intervention on it from a mile away.

Otabek is fully convinced now that Phichit will hate him before the year is out, for all the extra jobs Phichit’s had to accept on both his and Yuri’s behalf. But then he thinks back on what he’s just heard, anchors on one of Yakov’s words, zeroes in. “You said battle-ready, Deputy Commander.”

“He did indeed. To raise the stakes even further, we’ve opted to proceed with your promotion.” Lilia’s smiling when she makes the revelation, but her sideward glance toward her best Rangers is scalpel-sharp.  “Your point team has assured me they’re ready to take responsibility for anything that might transpire on the field.”

_Your point team._

Immediately Yuri rounds on Victor, half-rising from his chair. “You did thi—”

“It wasn’t me, it wasn’t me! It was all Yuuri,” Victor declares. As if to make a point, he holds up both hands, palms out in a show of deference he clearly doesn’t feel, if his ear-to-ear grin is any indication. “He made quite the passionate argument for you a while ago. All I did was nod at everything he said.”

“The best of the best, I think, is what I said,” Yuuri offers, sheepishly, in response to Yuri’s pointed look.

“Did you really say that?”

“Why wouldn’t I? Isn’t it true?” Yuuri smiles. He is stronger than all of them, in a way, though he must not be fully aware of it—maybe no one is, Otabek surmises. Like all his strength sleeps quietly in the gentle, sun-warmed core of him, hidden from view until they need it most. 

“Look at your faces! Riding with you will be a party.” Victor laughs, head thrown back, in the face of all of Yuri’s incredulousness. The closest he gets to dropping his guard, in one way or another, is when he softens and says, “I’m already looking forward to it.”

This is the part they don’t teach you at school, Otabek thinks. The Drift is just the beginning. A Ranger assumes responsibility for his copilot. But above and beyond this, the reality of it is that it’s never _just two._ The members of a strike group assume responsibility for one another, pass through the fire, take both life and death in hand. Fight for this—this fragile, precious togetherness, as human beings with human souls.

“Here it is in writing, if you need further proof.” Lilia pulls a sheet of paper from her desk drawer—a letter, with the official PPDC letterhead scrolling like a banner of war across the top of the page. She slides it across toward Yakov, who takes it, gestures at Yuri to rise and receive it. "After you sign I’ll have copies of the contract made for immediate circulation.”

Then the letter is in Yuri’s hands, and he’s turning back over his shoulder.

“Beka?”

Otabek hears his name. He, too, rises. Crosses the floor, until they stand side by side.

 

_27 July 2021_

_From the Desk of Lilia Baranovskaya_  
_Pan-Pacific Defense Corps Marshal_  
_PPDC Shatterdome, Vladivostok, Russia_

_To all personnel:_

_I write to confirm the elevation of Cadets Yuri Plisetsky and Otabek Altin to Ranger status, effective immediately._

_The abovementioned are to assume pilot control of the Mark-1 Jaeger Astra Nova, concerted restoration efforts on which were begun in January 2018 and have been officially completed as of this month. They will operate primarily as the Vladivostok defense team’s secondary flank alongside first flank pilots Jean-Jacques Leroy and Isabella Yang, under the orders of senior Rangers Victor Nikiforov and Yuuri Katsuki, in compliance with PPDC regulations._

_This appointment is made with the full recommendation of Rangers Nikiforov and Katsuki, who have reported multiple opportunities to observe superior levels of intra-battle decision-making aptitude, mental resilience, and interpersonal trust demonstrated by the candidates over the course of their comprehensive training. In light of this it is our collective assertion that no more suitable candidates for promotion currently exist on-site._

_I close this memorandum with the assertion that I believe wholeheartedly in the skills and synergy of the defense team as it is currently composed. On behalf of the Pan-Pacific Defense Corps, I accept and express my gratitude for their commitment to the defense of the Russian coastline, and the protection of humanity at large._

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I've taken a couple of liberties with PacRim canon that I hope purists will forgive me for! The first Kaiju sighting is stated in the film as taking place on August 10, 2013, but I elected to move it back about three years to give the kids time to... be alive, haha.
> 
> The last chapter will serve as an epilogue of sorts, because I think it's only fitting that we close out with a little glimpse of the boys when they're more fully broken-in, working as part of a team, after everything they've been through. The main story wraps up with this chapter, so thank you very very much for seeing it through with me!


	6. epilogue: the only chance I'll take

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> CAN YOU BELIEVE WE MADE IT???
> 
> Chapter title from "On Fire," by Switchfoot.

“Here?”

“No, higher.”

_“Here?”_

“Why do you sound so surprised? Just take it all off.”

“Everything?”

“ _Yes,_ I said.” Yuri frowns at Otabek’s reflection in their bathroom mirror. “God, Beka, it’s not a big deal.”

Their setup and tools are hardly ideal—just the two of them and Otabek’s desk chair yanked into the bathroom and positioned in the middle of the floor, and nothing more suitable to work with than a pair of stolen medical scissors, a broom, and a dustpan. Yuri can only just make out his own face, given the chair’s height, but as far as he’s concerned that’s a moot point; Otabek can see him just fine, and that’s good enough.

“You say that now, but if you don’t like the way it turns out, you’re not going to talk to me.” Otabek’s hands idle at the back of his neck, parting the lengths of his hair, carding through the strands. Too long now, they’ve agreed, and too wild—hanging down past the shoulderblades, a singular pain to wrestle into a helmet, a disaster post-helmet removal. But the thing is Yuri’s decided it could use more than a trim this time. “I keep telling you I can take you to a barber when we next go to town.”

Yuri huffs. “And spend _money?_ I have to get Deda a new coat before winter hits.”

“Which I said I’d help you with, remember?” Otabek sighs and clips a lock between two fingers to measure out the new length. “Well, if you’re sure.”

“Just follow that,” Yuri tells him, leaning backward, just a little. When Otabek’s fixing him up like this all his stiffness, all his caution falls away. By way of instruction he gestures at the faded photo taped to the lower right corner of the bathroom mirror. “Give me what Mom’s got.”

It’s a picture taken on one of the catwalks in the main hangar. In it Astra Nova’s pilots have just completed their first dispatch—sweat across their brows and helmets under their arms, leaning shoulder-to-shoulder to stay upright, but smiling. Exuberant, to mark what they can only hope is the first of many such returns. Otabek touches a corner of the photo, skims over it with his thumb, wordless and reverent, before he pulls the scissors from his pocket and begins to cut.

There’s precious little Yuri knows about who his parents used to be, before they became soldiers. There’s only one story he knows back to front, because it’s the one his grandfather most loves to tell—the one of the day his son Sasha told him he meant to sign up for enlisted basic training with the Air Force, how that had led to the longest and most explosive quarrel they’d ever had. And when Nikolai had pulled out what he’d assumed was his trump card— _What about Nadia? Don’t you want to marry her?—_ his son had only shrugged and said, _She’s already there._

Yuri remembers his grandfather laughing to tell it, laughing even as he said that they’d been breaking his heart over and over since that day. What do you expect, when your impossible son meets his match in such an impossible woman? Beautiful Nadia Sokolova, the spitfire-girl with the green eyes and masses and masses of coppery hair tumbling all about her in wild waves, just shearing it all off without a second thought, jumping unencumbered onto the back of an army truck. _“But why, Sasha?” I asked him. “Did you make her go?” And all your father said to me was, “She went because she wanted to, Papa. That’s all.”_

That stretch of years, the big _before,_ only exists to Yuri in his grandfather’s photographs. In his memories, she looks different. Her hair is always short; she kept it cropped at the nape until the end of her life and never wore it long again. It was Yuri’s hair, instead, that she allowed to grow out—if only for the sake perhaps of adding another item to her laundry list of ways to care for him. He remembers the monthly trims, the nightly combing while his father sat on the floor at his feet and told him stories about ghost-girls and monsters that rose from the sea; still only just stories then, nothing more dangerous than stories for many years.

In his memories, Yuri is also in a chair—only he’s so small his feet don’t touch the floor, and he’s leaning forward, toward his father’s voice. Straining for the next thread of the tale: _What happens next?_ The lengths of his hair catch in his mother’s grip, pull tight; he ignores the ache at the base of his skull until she rests her hand on his shoulder. _Stay still, Yurochka._

Only now he’s taller, and he’s mastered the art of staying still, listening to the too-familiar snip of the scissors in an altogether different pair of hands.

“You look a lot like her.”

“You think?” He’s heard that one before, been told that other people can see his father in his long, lanky limbs and the color of his hair. _But your face, your face is all Nadia._

“Sure.” Otabek smiles, snips. “Unless you take a leaf from your dad’s book and grow a beard, maybe.”

Yuri rolls his eyes. “No chance.”

There’s this thing that happens to the air in the room, when they look at each other in the mirror—this unreal lightness. Yuri remembers being five years old, standing on tiptoe to practice his military salute, meeting colonels and generals and matching their stony expressions with a dogged solemnity that looked so out-of-place on his face it broke them and made them laugh. How he hadn’t allowed himself to so much as crack a smile until he was absolutely certain no one else was watching.

He’s never forgotten that life, and he never will—what it was like, who he thought he’d grow up to be, then.

Otabek finishes his work carefully, makes the last cuts with deliberate precision, brushes the last stray strands to the floor. When he settles his hands on Yuri’s shoulders and asks “So, are we okay?”, Yuri can well imagine it stands for several things at once.

He considers his own image in the mirror, touches the bare nape of his neck and thinks—just a little longer than he knows he normally would have—about how to answer. But he’s interrupted by a knock on the door of their room, then a soft groan as it opens. After that, Yuuri’s voice.

“Otabek? Yurio?”

“In the bathroom.” It’s a statement made with as much nonchalance as anything Otabek ever says. Yuri doesn’t notice—at least not right off the bat—the strangeness of it. What he _does_ notice, though, is the silence, which begins at the end of the sentence and stretches on so long he wonders if Yuuri has left the room.

Then, tentatively: “... Both of you?”

Yuri sees Otabek bite the inside of his cheek. He finds the words building rapidly to a shout inside him, a quick burn, and then he’s turning his head toward the bathroom door and yelling, “Dammit, Katsudon, are you coming in or not?!”

Another long silence. Both Yuri and Otabek have their knuckles pressed to their mouths, as though they’re physically trying to shove the laughter back down. Which is stupid, Yuri knows; it’s like being little kids again, getting up to mischief that doesn’t mean much.

“N-no it’s fine! Totally fine! I j-just wanted to check if you were awake, but it seems you’re awake! More than awake, I guess—it’s fine!” They listen—hear the shuffling, the scuffling. “See you two at breakfast!”

The door closes, and the dam breaks seconds later, Yuri doubling over, snickering and clasping his ribs. Otabek doesn’t follow, though Yuri’s willing to bet all his savings it’s taking every iota of his by-now-legendary self-control not to, from the way he pushes off the back of the chair and sets too hastily to sweeping up the “evidence.”

“You’re—stop laughing, you’re terrible—come on, we need to go.”

For two months now it’s been quiet, which means that the Vladivostok defense team has had little to do besides train and wait for the axe to drop. As designated leader and resident human battery, Victor’s been applying his seemingly inexhaustible energy reserves toward figuring out ways to build the team’s interpersonal rapport and improve their synergy. Thus far they’ve tried coordinated gym routines, dawn-to-dusk sparring, a roundtable discussion on strategy. His latest schtick is taking meals together, at the same long table in the middle of the mess hall every day. He says there’s nothing like it for building a sense of solidarity, though perhaps his greatest (and most transparent) rationale is that oversaturation will motivate Yuri and JJ to channel their energies less toward trying to kill each other and more toward actually killing the kaiju, whenever they decide to reappear.

The others are already there when they enter, have already taken their places and started eating, Victor and Yuuri on one side of the table, Isabella on the other. One empty chair beside her and  two more at the ends. JJ still on his feet, setting a coffeepot down on the table, and of course he’s the first to notice the new arrivals.

“Hey, nice hair, Plisetsky! Good to see your face for once!” He reaches out with one arm as they approach, but Yuri catches his wrist and digs his fingers in, shoves it aside more forcefully than is strictly necessary.

He knows his own strength, so even he can tell it’s too much, but he can’t quite help it—not yet. “Try to touch me again and you can kiss your arm goodbye.”

“Yowch, his bite’s as bad as his bark!” JJ circles around and drops down into the empty chair at the head of the table, pouting furiously. “Bella, kiss it better.”

“You get no sympathy from me,” Isabella declares, but she pats the offended wrist nevertheless. Looks Yuri full in the face and smiles, then Otabek. “Coffee, you two?”

They sit. Otabek’s careful to place himself in the chair next to Isabella, maneuvering Yuri gently but firmly into the last empty chair on the opposite end of the table from JJ, putting the two of them out of each other’s striking range. “Yes, please, thank you.”

“The new cut suits you.” Yuuri speaks up in the middle of buttering his bread. “Was that what you were, um, busy with earlier?”

“Huh? Yeah.” Suddenly Yuri feels the air, prickling up and down the back of his neck, the swathe of skin bare and exposed. He brings a hand to his nape, scrubbing at it irritably, while the other starts to poke at his scrambled eggs. “I wanted a change. It was getting kinda heavy.”

Victor chuckles as he stirs a packet of sugar into his coffee. And then another. And then, to Yuri’s mounting horror, another. “You’re not the rebel I thought you were, Yurio. I don’t know if you remember, but back when Yuuri and I were running second flank my hair was twice as long as yours.”

Yuri sneers. “I remember. My dad always said it took five extra minutes to get your helmet on.”

It’s always noisy at mess, but this time he’s hyper-aware of how sound travels around the table. The interlocking conversations, how he can’t disengage completely from any of them. Over his shoulder, Otabek’s murmuring a question he doesn't quite catch to Isabella, something about the coffee, and Yuri deciphers her answer in snatches: “There’s a place in town... Arabica beans... we can show you, next time...” JJ chiming in: “I know a guy who...”

“Phichit-kun!” On Yuri’s other side the greeting peals out like a bell, making his ear ring. He cups a hand over it protectively, but it’s not quite solid enough to block out Phichit’s answering “Yuuri!” from two tables away, or the peculiar melody of their two voices raised in laughter. There’s nothing to laugh about, even—nothing that Yuri can discern, unless there’s some kind of joke coded into the words “good morning” that only the two of them know.

“... way too many people at this table,” he mumbles, glancing down, rubbing at the side of his head.

“Right? Isn’t it wonderful to eat with everyone?” Victor’s eyes shine under the overhead lights. That’s one thing about him Yuri finds he’s never understood—how someone who’s seen so much battle still walks through the world with all that light spilling out of him, a radiance that pours off in waves. “The two of you don’t need to be alone anymore!”

“What the—You can’t just say stuff like that!” It’s jarring to hear it said. It feels like being disarmed, so of course all the spines go up. Next to him Otabek lets out a soft noise that sounds suspiciously like a chuckle, try as he might to disguise it as a cough. He brings up one hand to try and muffle it, but Yuri is quicker—slapping it away, irritated. “And don’t you start, Beka!”

They both know there’s no need to say it. Otabek smiles and makes no argument, returns his modest attention to his food and his coffee. Yuri relaxes a little, as much as his own stubbornness will allow.

Victor’s already done eating, the rest of them working through the last few bites on their plates or draining their cups when the alarms go off.

_Attention. Attention. Harmony Tango, Justice Jackal, Astra Nova. Report to Bay 7, level A39. Kaiju, codename Vodyanoy, Category 4 sighted at 0900 hours. I repeat—_

JJ whistles through his teeth. “A full sortie, first thing in the morning? And for a Cat Four too. These kaiju really know how to crash a party.”

“We don’t have time for your complaints, first flank! Vladivostok defense team, scatter!”

True to form, Victor is on his feet in a flash, but it’s Yuuri who moves first, taking his partner by the arm and half-dragging, half-lifting him away from the table. “What do you mean, scatter? No scattering. We’re all using the same elevator.”

The other four rise to follow, just as quickly. JJ swipes a half-eaten bread roll from off his plate and shoves it into his mouth as they make for the elevator without missing a beat.

“Mmmph hmmphf fffmmm mphmmmph mmff!” It’s clearly not what he’d been going for in terms of delivery. Clearly a take two is in order, so he chews rapidly a few more times, swallows, tries again. “I said, let’s kick some kaiju ass!”

Isabella groans, Yuri knows he’s about to have words, but this time Otabek beats him to the punch, just grabs Yuri’s wrist in his hand and hustles him forward, muttering “Come on, come on, let’s go, before you kill him” under his beath.

Yuri’s wrist stays in Otabek’s grip as the elevator races up and up in time to the wail of the sirens. He feels his blood already beginning to beat with urgency, his breathing quickening—or maybe that’s Otabek’s, or Isabella’s, or Victor’s, or all of theirs. He can’t tell, even when the six of them hit the corridor outside the Drivesuit Room and break apart from one another, just before they make for their separate chambers.

“We’ll see you on the water,” Victor says. From the sound of it you’d never think they were about to go to war. “Let’s make it back in time for lunch. Maybe brunch, even.”

“We can’t make Nikolai cook an extra meal,” Yuuri protests, tugging firmly at his hand.

“We’ll go to town, then.”

“But we’ll have to get permission—”

“Yuuri, you know I already have it.”

“Vitya, don’t be—”

“Yuri thinks brunch is for old ladies.”

It’s not a _yes, let’s go to town,_ or a _no, let’s not go to town._ It’s just what Yuri would have said himself, only the words were out of Otabek’s mouth long before they were even a fully-formed thought in his mind. And the others must know this; the sound of Victor’s laughter fills up the whole room, ricochets off the partitions that separate them.

The techs have already finished helping them into their armor and are in the process of affixing the spinal clamps when Yuri notices it. He feels it like a pulse, a muted presence on the very fringes of his consciousness. He’s aware the energy isn’t his own—it’s far too low-key for that, too steady and understated—and while it would make sense to assume that it must then be Otabek’s, it also makes no sense at all without the Drift up. You’re not one mind when you’ve disconnected from the hardware and become two people again; he doesn’t know if it’s even possible for a measure of that synchronicity to remain, like a kind of phantom limb.

He wonders if Otabek feels it too. When he comes back from his wondering they’re already hooked into the Conn-Pod and listening to Yakov take them through their final preparations before the sync-up, so he can’t ask—but, then again, maybe he doesn’t need to. He’ll know soon enough.

“Rangers, this is Deputy Commander Yakov Feltsman. Prepare for Neural Handshake.”

“Harmony Tango, born ready,” Victor says, satin-smooth, but it’s easy to hear the spark deep down underneath the polish, the little ember that is fury and delight and resolve all at once.

(In the background, too, Yuuri sighing: “Vitya, I swear—”)

Meanwhile Isabella’s voice is calm and clear over the tactical channel, ringing out so free of any hitches and tremors it comes off like a clean truth, a clarion call, impossible not to trust: “Copy that, sir. Justice Jackal standing by for Neural Handshake.”

It’s peculiar, maybe even a little funny, to listen to so many transmissions at once, hear so many voices echo around the inside of the Conn-Pod. For a moment Yuri is so occupied with listening that Otabek needs to call to him, to make sure he doesn’t miss his cue.

“You have to sound off.”

This is where the morning opens up. Yuri leans forward, throws the switch that will open their communication line, and joins his own voice to the chorus.

“Astra Nova, ready to align.”

The comm isn’t a bridge this time, a singular stream from Jaeger to Mission Control and back again. Instead it’s a net cast outwards, holding all of them together—six people and three giant machines and one tower for the sea to break against, standing fast, waiting to see her soldiers home.

What difference does it make? Yuri listens to the AI count the numbers down, catches and holds Otabek’s eye and feels the understanding hum between them: they’re about to find out.

**... Three, two, one. Initiating Neural Handshake.**

They sense the Jaeger first, all around them, its presence so fierce and powerful it threatens to overwhelm—the sheer fire and steel and will of it surging to life. At first, it doesn’t make sense to imagine that something so enormous could be moved by human hands. This alone already feels a little like battle, the act of interfacing, of negotiating a place from which you and your copilot can make your will known, but Yuri’s learned all you need to do is fall. It’s the same for Otabek; it must be.

When they shut their eyes and drop down through the Drift into Astra Nova’s heart, Yuri knows where to find him.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> 1\. I meant for this story to unfold somewhere in the early middle of the Kaiju War, before the decline and eventual phasing-out of the Jaeger Program as it's illustrated in the film. With regard to whether or not events pan out in this fic's universe the way they do in the source material—the short answer is, I don't really know. It's anybody's guess. There's a ton of story that has yet to be told or imagined, both covering the events prior to this fic and whatever might unfold after, and ultimately I think it's more fun that way.
> 
> 2\. I've yelled about this fic a lot on Twitter and I thought I'd share my [seating plan](https://twitter.com/delicadenza/status/865406956932022272) for the breakfast scene with all of you, because I'm a butt with very limited spatial awareness and also it was so weirdly fun to arrange these six idiots (well, five idiots and Isabella) in a way that I thought would make for the greatest amount of interesting interaction and least amount of Actual Violence. Yuri's not above throwing a knife, but I think the danger of that is at least mitigated by the fact that he's sandwiched between two Tempering Presences(TM).
> 
> 3\. I owe such huge thanks to my friends for putting up with my screaming and my need for sounding boards/pep-talkers/voices of reason for the two months (to the day!) that this fic has been alive. Biggest thanks to Keito, who's walked me through so many Important Creative Decisions and slapped me a good few times for second-guessing what I think is best, and when push comes to shove has always been there with encouraging keysmash and capslock. Biggest thanks of all to Ny, who has been absolutely lovely about being dragged along for the ride, has literally seen this fic through from birth to completion, tentacles and kaiju blue and all—you've been fantastic, you are fantastic, all this is for and because of you! No story is more compelling than one that never ends, and you and I have a suitably endless stream of headcanons and tearful screaming to look forward to.
> 
> 4\. Lastly—if you, dear reader, are still reading this, thank you from my heart! To all the lovely souls who have been kind enough to leave me kudos or comments or just stopped by to peek at what this monster was becoming (a few of whom I know took a chance on this fic without having seen the source material—you guys are wild omg), your support means the world to me. This fic took me out of my comfort zone in a ton of ways—high-octane action???? multichap?????? with more than three characters????????—and writing it has been the biggest learning experience. I know it's weird to use giant robots and the threat of an apocalypse by kaiju to talk about grief and memories and what it means to heal and to move forward from prior traumas toward an uncertain future, and I will admit I didn't know what the hell I was doing a good chunk of the time, but at the end of the day I'm proud to call this monster mine, and it's my dearest hope that there's something worthwhile in here for you too.
> 
> Peace!

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [one thing I could save from the fire [Podfic]](https://archiveofourown.org/works/13822662) by [ItsADrizzit](https://archiveofourown.org/users/ItsADrizzit/pseuds/ItsADrizzit)




End file.
